![]() ![]() It took another year and seven rejections before the editors at Thomas Nelson Publishers finally offered a contract. The manuscript was now a relatively slender 650 pages, and he was ready to send it out. “I wanted this book to be the one piece of writing that I composed exactly the way I wanted to–no deadline, no assignment, no editor, no boss, no committee to please.” He took two more years to write a second draft (“Lightning-fast for me!” he says), and another year to finish a third draft. First, I wanted to avoid that most annoying question, ‘Aren’t you finished with that yet?’, and second, I figured that if all those horrible statistics in the writers marketing guides were right and I never found a publisher, I wouldn’t have to explain my failure.”īentz was also busy with other projects at the time–going to graduate school, teaching college, writing freelance magazine articles–and writing his book was his one piece of work not subject to the expectations of others. “I let very few people know I was writing a novel,” he says. He felt embarrassed by how long the process was taking him, and he kept quiet about what he was doing. He started from scratch in the second draft of the novel, using his 1,200-page manuscript as raw material. It was too long and sprawling, but I still had no doubt there was a book in there. ![]() I had let the story wander wherever it wanted to. #1200 PAGE MANUSCRIPT HOW TO#“Nobody had ever taught me how to write a novel. I got off to a good start, but then things got out of control.”īy “out of control,” Bentz means that the story kept growing in unexpected directions until seven years later he had amassed a manuscript that exceeded 1,200 pages. It was a fantasy novel set in an exotic world with a group of characters I thought I knew intimately. He said, “At first, I thought I would be able to wrap up this book in a year or so since the ideas had been floating around in my head for a long time. ![]() Joseph Bentz took more than ten years to write his first novel, which was about nine years longer than he expected it to take. ![]()
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