Revise until you're content

“Dead Man’s Curve,” a cautionary tale of unbridled ambition, is on its way to my first readers. It’s got dead bodies, captivating women, political corruption and a dogged reporter just trying to do the right thing.

I started work on it in September with what I felt was a really good beginning and a rough outline. As I jotted down ideas and sketched out some scenes, the characters began introducing themselves. You see, I already had the first victim, the murder scene and my protagonist pretty well nailed. What I didn’t have right off was a motive. Wait, that’s not quite true. I had too many possible motives at first. But that gave me choices. (Choices are good.) I’ll get back to that later.

Meantime, I fiddled around writing scenes and dialog for a couple of characters, getting to know them better. Next thing I knew, pieces of the story began to fall into place. That gave me a good start on building the story arc. I could flesh things out later.

I made a conscious decision to let the characters and the story evolve organically. Sometimes I draft a detailed outline if it’s pretty clear where I want things to go. Other times, I write the first part of a story, and based on what’s taking shape, I start the outline somewhere in the middle of the process. Guess what? The organic thing seemed to work out pretty well.

As I often do, I revised as I went, adding a scene and going back to make earlier parts of the story conform to the new material or vice versa, as the case might be. That began to open up additional possibilities that stimulated my imagination even more. (That’s where the fun is.) Although, then I had to eliminate a section that no longer fit in. (I saved it for another project.)

Draft completed, it was time for the serious revisions, which exposed some flaws and sparked some really nice changes, including the title, originally “His Honor’s Death” which wasn’t completely satisfactory. I also added a hired assassin, another murder and made some slight adjustments to the motive I’d chosen during earlier revisions.

Those changes also allowed me to rewrite the denouement, which I think has a lot more impact than in earlier versions.

~ Dave Autry