Draft after draft
You've taken the time (in my case it feels like an eternity) to complete the first draft of your novel. You feel good about it and put it away for a short while so your brain can solidify once more and when you finally go back to read it for the second draft it's full of holes and rushed dialogue and all of those horrible no no's you made while typing and talking to your two year old at the same time. Awful but fixable. You finish your second draft and put it right back on the shelf again until the time comes where you feel like you can stomach reading it again. It's not that you're not in love with your story or your characters but let's be honest, when their life becomes your life for that long you begin to bitter at the idea that you have to give them any more time. And yet the time comes around again where you want to read your book and complete it for all of those agents who will never read it (you can't hear it but the world's smallest violin has begun to play.)
Lo and behold, there are still problems with your manuscript! Let's face it, you will always find something wrong. It's your work and you are your worst critic and not until you've gone through fifty drafts and spent your life and every waking moment tweaking it will you ever be happy. I always wonder if it's different for established authors with agents and editors. Do they have to go over and over their work or after a while are they perfectly happy with letting someone else take the reins so they can move on to another story and another hero? Or do they see the book all the way through, unhappy with the prospect that someone else could infect their characters and distort the original story with one sentence? Maybe one of these days I'll get to find out.
Until then I am on to draft three of my current novel then hopefully on to the next one. And it's about time because the other story and it's rich (and slightly bossy) characters have been floating around in my head for far too long and they refuse to wait much longer. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing but I have a lot of stories floating around in my head all the time. Books I've started then got stuck on come back to me with their solutions and how the plot can finally move forward and new characters are always popping in to make things complicated. You don't want to forget any of these things so I have notes upon notes for these different books everywhere! I mean EVERYWHERE! Maybe I should get myself a secretary? But then I'd have to write legibly and that would take too much time. Oh well.
Wish me luck with this (God willing) last draft :)
Lo and behold, there are still problems with your manuscript! Let's face it, you will always find something wrong. It's your work and you are your worst critic and not until you've gone through fifty drafts and spent your life and every waking moment tweaking it will you ever be happy. I always wonder if it's different for established authors with agents and editors. Do they have to go over and over their work or after a while are they perfectly happy with letting someone else take the reins so they can move on to another story and another hero? Or do they see the book all the way through, unhappy with the prospect that someone else could infect their characters and distort the original story with one sentence? Maybe one of these days I'll get to find out.
Until then I am on to draft three of my current novel then hopefully on to the next one. And it's about time because the other story and it's rich (and slightly bossy) characters have been floating around in my head for far too long and they refuse to wait much longer. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing but I have a lot of stories floating around in my head all the time. Books I've started then got stuck on come back to me with their solutions and how the plot can finally move forward and new characters are always popping in to make things complicated. You don't want to forget any of these things so I have notes upon notes for these different books everywhere! I mean EVERYWHERE! Maybe I should get myself a secretary? But then I'd have to write legibly and that would take too much time. Oh well.
Wish me luck with this (God willing) last draft :)
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