The Serial Dater's Shopping List by Morgen Bailey

This is a novel I'll be reviewing soon.  In the meantime, I am lucky enough to be able to share a guest post from Morgen Bailey about her writing:

I wrote my third novel, The Serial Dater’s Shopping List, for NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org) 2009. It ended up being a 115,640-word first draft, written with three days to spare! I took a year to edit (and re-edit) it down to just over 100,000 words.

In November 2018 and half of January this year, I wrote the first draft of the follow-up, The Serial Dieter’s Shopping List, which has Izzy’s sidekick, health and beauty columnist Donna, set with the task of eating thirty-one under-five-hundred-calorie dishes in thirty-one days. As if that wasn’t complicated enough, she’s sent to the sister newspaper at Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, not far from where I grew up so semi-familiar territory. She works there during the week but stays with her wacky mother, Lesley, in nearby Tring, where my mum lives.

They say to write what you know and while my knowledge influences my writing, I obviously have to do my research. If I’m in a hurry I put ‘CHECK THIS’ or if I get stuck, I put ‘MORE HERE’ then move to another part of the novel so that when I’ve finished the first draft, I can go back to the ‘check this’es and ‘more here’s.

There are generally two types of authors: plotters and pantsers. I’ve interviewed over 700 authors for my blog and most say they are pantsers. That is that they get an idea (however vague) and run with it, seeing ‘what happens’. I was the same for The Serial Dater. I had a list of male characters, some as simple as ‘Cling film on his arm, just had tattoo done, hides from mum as still lives at home’ – we all know someone who should have moved out years ago, and I set Izzy to meet them all. Most of my characters are non-experts so I don’t have too far a stretch and too much research to do.

I have a wonderful array of beta readers (I’m always looking for more) who tell me where I need to change something and (hopefully) what works. While The Serial Dater was fairly fresh in my mind, I needed The Serial Dieter to be different and the feedback I’ve had so far is that it is… but perhaps too different. Having Donna as the main character rather than Izzy, who is me (my brother calls The Serial Dater my autobiography!), I needed to ensure that I wasn’t rewriting her. It seems to have worked except that Lesley, her mother, actually ended up more quirky than Donna whereas Donna was the quirky one in the first book. So one of my tasks as I go back through The Serial Dieter is to give her more oomph. There’s a love triangle in this book and she’s tempted by a new colleague as her currently relationship (you find out who she’s with in The Serial Dater) has hit a sticky patch.

Try to write every day. 300 words a day would get you a staggering 100,000 words in a year (109,500 actually, 109,800 in a leap year) so easily a novel. If you don’t have that much time then 100 words a day would get you 36,500 – that’s half a standard James Patterson novel or a whole novella.

Also, don’t worry if you’re not happy with your first draft. You can edit a first draft whereas you can’t edit a blank page. Join a local writing group. Hopefully they’ll be firm but fair and help you see where you’re going wrong… and right!

Morgen’s website is http://morgenbailey.wordpress.com and email is morgen@morgenbailey.com. She is morgenwriteruk on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook where she also runs a free mentoring group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/morgensmondaymentorship. She’s happy to hear from anyone interested in writing and / or reading. Morgen makes a point of the ‘Morgen with an E’ because MorgAn Baileys include a rocket scientist (female) and male: athlete, Green politician, basketball player, and transsexual porn star!