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I recently wrote about hitting a major writing milestone: completing that first draft of my very first novel. There I was, celebrating to all of my various online friends that I had done it. I had reached those glorious words, "The End." I leaned back in my chair and thought, yes. I'm done! I erroneously thought that that was going to be the hardest part about writing a novel.
Oh, how wrong I was.
I immediately began on the revision process, thinking, this can't be that bad. I edit all day every day. And I have also written and submitted short stories before. Revising a 2,000-word short story was not at all preparation for revising a novel. As I started to make my way through my chapters, I realized something horrible. I hadn’t actually hit my word count goal (50,000 words) because I had included so many placeholders in my manuscript. I hadn't wanted to break my writing flow, so instead of pausing every other page to do research, I optimistically put in a placeholder for later me to deal with.
And now the chickens have come home to roost for that later me.
These chickens have also decided that the book should be written in the third-person limited point of view (POV) rather than the first-person point of view that I had written the first draft in.
So, not only do I have to fully flesh out descriptions and plot points, I also have to revise all of the POV language. A daunting task.
It’s a good thing that I’m a professional editor and that I actually like the revision process. Combing through the tangled mess of my first draft is extremely satisfying even if it is tremendously difficult work.
And I say tremendously difficult because this is where I start to see the cliches and tired tropes that I relied on to keep my narrative zipping through to the end. This is where I start to see the sentences that need to be revised, and revised, and revised. I can spend several hours on just a few paragraphs as I write, delete, write, revise, delete, write, revise, ad nauseum.
But it’s also wonderfully satisfying because I’m getting to see my characters fully flesh out and become three-dimensional beings that I actually enjoy being with (or want to gouge their eyes out with a spoon, depending on how they’re treating my protagonist at the moment).
I’ve also discovered that this second draft is going to need at least one more draft before I feel comfortable sharing with my first reader (my husband) and then off to an editor before I start querying. Just as I set August of this year as my goal for that first draft, I’d like to set the end of the year as my goal for my next two revisions.
I’ve written that goal down, so now it’s my turn to do the hard work to make that goal a reality.
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