In Response (quite possibly the worst post title ever)
I've gotten a few question about the writing process in terms of drafts. Everyone does it differently, but this is what I do.
Draft One: Entirely slipshod. It's the first time the story has existed end-to-end in written form. 80% of it will be rewritten, at least, so revising as I write is a waste of time. I'm not even sure this would be readable to someone else. Well, they could read it, but they probably wouldn't enjoy it.
Draft Two: This is where I am now with This Doesn't Feel Like The Future. This draft is entirely readable and comprehensible by another human, but there will be structural issues popping up as the story evolves. and characters become more/less interesting. This draft has extensive editing, though not at the granular level of later drafts.
Maybe a third of the first draft will remain when I'm done. Everything else has been rewritten, which is why this draft takes the longest time. A year, I'm guessing, though I'm hoping to be finish sooner than that, which means it will take two years. This is, for me, the draft where the most progress is made.
Draft Three: This draft, and every one that follows, is about solving problems. At the macro level (structure), for now, then increasingly focused on the micro level (flow, word choice) in later drafts. And I say macro level, but there will be plenty of editing and rewriting in this draft. It's just that the story has to be locked down at some point so you're not writing toward a moving target, and I want to get it done here.
Draft four: Starting in this draft, I'll go through a chapter and make a count of everything I corrected or that still needs correcting. I don't mean at the typo level; the count is more concerned with things at the paragraph/sentence level (unfortunately, sometimes at the passage level as well, which is painful).
When the count is going down in each draft, I know I'm making progress.
I might still be rewriting passages and moving paragraphs around, but from this draft forward, it should rapidly reduce.
Draft five: I didn't read the manuscript out loud until the last draft for The Man You Trust, but it will happen much earlier this time. It gives you a definitive notion of where wording is clunky, because you can't skip over anything when you read it out loud.
Now is when everything you've kicked down the road starts to stand out like a sore thumb, because most other problems have been cleaned up by now. It's the draft where you rewrite a sentence ten times, or twenty, because no version sounds exactly right. At this point, the vast majority of the narrative should be flowing smoothly, and if there's friction, it's only because you want it there.
Draft six, etc.: Now I'm at the sentence level, or even individual words. I'm also starting to push words around instead of make improvements, which is a good sign that I'm almost done. This is the draft where I'll go through multiple pages without any notes, and if I do need to fix something, it's often something only I would notice.
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Like I said, everyone is different, and I'm particularly labor-intensive, much to my dismay. It seemed to work for the first book, though, and it's working on this one as well.
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