Fell Runner: First Draft Done!

Last week, I finished up a first draft of Fell Runner!

Well, technically, I got to the end the week before that, but it was a bit of a mess and had a lot of gaps. I just couldn’t figure out where those gaps were. And what they should be filled with. The book itself even felt thin—novella length is supposed to hit between 30k-40k words, typically, and this one was coming in at a very, very lean 22k.

There’s something to be said for letting a story be the length it needs to be and damn the man—but I knew that this was not the length the story needed to be. It lacked depth. It lacked consequence. It lacked a certain connectivity, cohesiveness.

It didn’t help that it was just a damn hard story to write. I was trying to do a lot of things in it, formally (which is to say, with the exploration of form). I knew that going into it; from the moment I conceived of the idea of a novella about a fell runner, I knew that it would be an experiment. I’ve mulled on the idea for years, wondering what shape a story like that would have to take. I thought about how the mind travels on a long run, how the body moves. The mental leaps through time and space as well as the literal time and space you travel. And then, of course, there is setting. You can’t write about the fells and not be deeply invested in the landscape itself.

During the novella class I took this fall, the first book we read was a group was The Taiga Syndrome, by Cristina Rivera Garza. It was phenomenal and odd and structurally different. It hit many of the notes I want to hit with Fell Runner. The broken timeline; the interwoven narratives of memory; mysterious, unexplained happenings; it even interjected moments of fairytale kind of like Fate’s Bane.

Once I fought my way to the end—it was an oddly reticent writing process, probably because it felt like so much of a stretch and because I wanted to Achieve Specific Things—I knew I need to reread it before I turned it in. I could have sent it to my editor, but he would only tell me things I already knew and it would be better for both of us if I really put the time in to make it better before soliciting his opinion. (I consider this a kind of rigor of craft. No shortcuts. No laziness. Just patience and attending to the work.)

So I printed it out and took it with me on a little writing retreat. The first day, I read through the whole thing, taking copious notes. “Move this here” and “Expand this section” and “This is interesting, maybe there is more here?”—stuff like that. On the readthrough, I could see and feel where the weaknesses were—sections that felt too long in comparison to others, or too short. Moments glossed over too quickly.

I kept track of a list of changes to make on draft 1.5.

Over the next few days, I chopped and screwed.

Some scenes stretched.

Scenes at the end got moved to the beginning. The very first lines got moved to the very end.

The draft still did not end up being much longer, but it feels less thin now. Now, it feels like if it is a short novella, it will at least be because it is meant to be.

For now, it’s with the editor, and I’ve turned my attention to Codename: Monster Slayer.