Ask the Author: Frank Freudberg
Answered Questions (2)
Frank Freudberg
Hey Aaron, good morning. "Gasp" has been reissued as "Find Virgil" on Amazon (as a paperback, audiobook and Kindle). If you want to, send me your email address and I'll "gift" you a Kindle version -- and if you like it, definitely post a review on Amazon (and here). Reviews are big for writers. Hope you like Gasp -- the longer and more-involved version. Find Virgil is streamlined and moves faster and more cinematic. A movie version is the ultimate goal. Thanks for writing. Best, ... Frank Freudberg
Frank Freudberg
HI Maxine, and thanks for your question about a genuinely challenging element of writing: how to get to The End. I use two related techniques that seem to work, at least for me. The first thing I do is I get a giant poster board and hand-draw a "thought map" of whatever story elements occur to me during this part of the planning phase. I try to put them down in a rough chronological sequence which, naturally, suggests a beginning, middle and end. Like everything else in writing (again, for me), nothing is written in stone and I fully appreciate that practically everything I'm drawing will eventually be changed, eliminated or re-positioned as I work through subsequent drafts. This is kind of a visual outline. I then put this poster board up on a wall across the room so that I, at a glance, can see the whole arc of the story. It helps keep me on track. This process can take (depending upon the flow of ideas and whatever else is going on in my life) anywhere from an afternoon to several months. And of course, I'm always modifying it as new thoughts pop up. The second thing I do is begin my 30-day first-draft marathon. I try to stick to exactly 30 days. Each day, almost always beginning around dawn, I will sit down and keep writing until I have 12 double-spaced pages (as you probably know, that equals about 250 words per page, or a total of 3,000 words). I don't stop and I don't write less than 12 pages, even if I have to fill the pages with nonsense, double-talk and lots of dialog (to fill up pages faster). Thirty days later, I have a complete first draft of about 90,000 words. That's when the real trouble begins, because now I have a book that I gave birth to after many weeks of hard labor. It has become real, and the characters start developing their, well, character. The manuscript is likely to be in terrible, horrible shape, and it's definitely going to evolve and go in all kinds of unanticipated directions, but at least it is recognizable (barely) as a novel. Years ago an established novelist advised me, "Finish the first draft no matter how bad it is; you have the rest of your life to make it better -- but if you don't finish it, then it's just a dream you once had, it's not a reality." That's how I do it.
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