The Low Survival Rate of Early Chapters

My current project imagines itself will one day be a full-length novel. Today it is 3500 words of metawriting (writing about the writing—we’ll call it an outline) and 4000 words of manuscript. Both are, as they should be at this stage of the effort, a wholistic mess. 

The manuscript contains chapter stubs that are trying to keep up with outline (which has run ahead, already in its second draft). A few of these chapters will survive, in one form or another, but most will not. They will morph into each other. Some will split apart. They will be reordered. Others will be cut. New, unforeseen chapters will appear between them. At some point a shape will emerge, the contours of plot will be revealed, and the novel writing will be fully underway. 

If this sounds like a sloppy process with many wasted words, I’ve communicated well. It has been said ten pages of prose must be written for every one finished page of manuscript. In my experience this is spot on. 3000 pages to get to a 300 page novel is about right. When I think back on the first draft of The Confessions of Adam, I’m not at all sure even a sentence of it survived to greet the reader. I can say with certainty that the opening of the novel is altogether different. For all of this, the reader should be grateful. They have missed nothing. The goal is to work until the prose peaks and then stop. The reader takes it from there. We can all be grateful for the low survival rate of early chapters. Our stories are better for it.