1st Draft Vs 2nd Draft

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Long time readers may recall in 2016, I completed my first draft of Follow Me: Tattered Veils.  Only I didn’t know it was my first draft, I thought my manuscript was complete and began to query agents.  

I did this even though I was not happy with my first chapter and knew it was a bad hook.  

I did this even though I knew the manuscript rambled and barely held together as a story.

I did this even though my main character is unlikeable and awkward. 

How could I call the manuscript complete with these huge flaws?  How could I query?  It’s simple: I’ve always loved Follow Me: Tattered Veils and I had taken the manuscript as far as I knew how to carry it.  Isn’t selling the next step?  

I shudder at my ignorance, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  I wrote other stories, and I workshopped Follow Me: Tattered Veils in between.  After letting it rest about a year, I began rewrites.

Where the first draft came out in patches over the course of two years, with multiple deleted scenes only I’ve read.  I finished the second draft in nine months.  My planning and speed increased.  It took a year of thinking, but I knew better than ever what story I wanted to tell.

So what’s different? 

The order, I’ve joined “kick ass first chapter club.”  My plot.  Follow Me: Tattered Veils tells two stories.  The first draft told Gerry’s story, but I needed to develop Roxi’s.  No one liked Roxi because no one knew her well.  The second draft opens up and gives Roxi time to be herself.

  

  

I wrote twelve new chapters.  Of the twelve new chapters, eight are Roxi centric.  Sharing more social interactions, scenes, and pivotal moments in her life.  These moments create chemistry in my cast.

 Beyond those eight Roxi centric chapters, two of those chapters are about Gerry discovering new insights into Roxi.  So audiences get Gerry’s twisted narration of Roxi where Roxi would be more tight-lipped.  What Gerry says about Roxi isn’t gospel truth, but it has a certain ring of truthiness.  I’m using the audience’s interest in Gerry to make them interested in Roxi.  *Does and evil victory dance*

These were my “big changes,” but the second draft overhauled everything.  Awkward wording, repetitive phrasing, and verb tense shifts are some elements I tackled.  I clarified each of my character’s voices.  I deleted massive amounts of their “thoughts” and made the few casual insights have depth.  

Why talk about this now?  I wanted to write about my drafting process and insights while I drafted, but I feared pausing the process would derail my work.  Now as I wait on my copy editor I have nothing but time to reflect.  

Talk to me.  What does your drafting process look like?  What are the biggest changes from first draft to second draft?  Are you like me where you believe each itteration is the “final” product or do you have a better sense of when your WIP is done?

Looking for more posts about the writing and publishing process?  Check out more posts on my novel publication process: Going Through Copy Edits, 1st Daft vs 2nd Draft, Goal Planning: Getting Through the First Draft, My Character Looks Nothing Like My MC, Cover Art: Truth in Advertising, and Post Book Launch: Reflections.  

Want to know more about my novel?  Check out my childhood stories recapping themes in my life I hope prepared me to write this book: Remember the Magic of Santa?, Closet Monsters: Gone too Far?, and Garden Gnomes and other Evils.

OR check out my series where I find similarities between my novel and other popular media.  Hopefully it gives you a better idea whether there are elements in my book you may enjoy. Lost Girl Comparison, American Gods Comparison, and The O.A. Comparison.

MY BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT AMAZON!!!  Please go look at "Follow Me: Tattered Veils" and see if it might be a story that interests you.

Reflections of a Writer: Softwares I've Used to Write a Novel

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I’ve written four and a half novels in my time.  None of them published, but that‘s not the point of today’s post.  Today I want to talk about the different softwares I wrote with.

The first book was one document in Microsoft Word.  I was on an old school Windows 3.1, outdated even then (but ran well and was a perfect distraction free writing tool), and I transferred the novel to our updated computer for printing with a floppy disc.  All my technology nostalgia comes from writing.  Kept a hard copy of my book in a binder and I was the proudest 16yr old you’d ever met.

Microsoft Word was not an ideal writing platform.  It was hard for me to go back to specific parts in my book to edit.  My dyslexia/visual tracking issues are the stars of this gripe.  Going line by line, chapter by chapter, trying to match the hard copy with where ever I am in the electronic document was torture.  Sometimes I think I hate editing because it was so hard to scroll through this massive document, and not because the process is otherwise arduous.

Worse, a massive Microsoft document made it hard for me to copy paste portions to forums, journals, and emails.  I was sharing this first novel because it was the first in a series.  Sharing the work was time consuming.

There are no places in the same Word document to write notes, an outline, or research. Unable to keep all the work together in a single format, I had a separate binder with research, notes, outlines, and journalling regarding my process.   It was yet another syncing issue I had between the enormous wall of text on the computer and the pages in my binder.

 I write my storiesout of order, but Microsoft Word made piece mailing the work together tricky.  At first, I tried using page breaks to section off the story flow from scenes I wrote that needed in between chapters to connect, but this was lengthy and confusing.  I couldn’t scroll to the bottom of the document to return to where I “left off” writing.  Instead, I had to creep through each page, searching for all the breaks.  Frustrated, I reverted to paper and pen.  Here, I’d write chapters or scenes by hand and hold on to them until I’d got to the part in my story where I could copy them into the master document.

Next time I wrote a novel, I wrote each chapter as a separate document and kept it in a book folder.  This improved almost everything and I recommend another using a standard editor keep all the chapters as separate documents under a book title folder.  The single issue I ran into was that the folder is default organized by title or by last updated or whatever, and I wanted my files organized with the first chapter on top and all the other chapters in descending order.  Took me a good year to realize I could force the alphabetical order to do this if I labeled “1 chapter” “2 chapter”.  The sort is by numerical order.  Some difficulties arose because I write out of order and I don’t know what chapter I’m writing all the time.

It was inconvenient when every time I wanted to read from one chapter to the next; I had to open another document.  For a time, I would keep each chapter separate and have a “master copy” with the whole work, but it was too hard to keep both sets of documents synced.  Inevitably I would add edits to the master copy, not copy paste over to the separate chapter file, and then read the separate chapter file and make major changes over there.  Too much going on.

Next, I went to Nimble.  This seemed to solve all problems.  A single document that let me skip to specific chapters.  And bonus, areas for notes and outlining!  I’d long since given up hope on that.  But, I had a new problem: no spelling or grammar check.  Now I had to paste each chapter from the original document into LangaugeTool online.  LangaugeTool should have connected into Nimble, but my tech savvy husband and I could never make that work.  After LangaugeTool, I pasted the work into Grammarly.  Then I had to take the chapter and bring it back to Nimble.  And when the whole novel completed, I bring it all one chapter at a time to Word. @_@. The software said it would transfer over to Word, but I never made that element of it work and had to give up and copy paste by hand.

  On one side, it was lovely to write distraction free.  On the other side, my typing needs extreme help.  During the revisions, I felt like I was reading the work of a third grader.  It made me question whether I could be a writer.  I’d never questioned whether I was good enough to write and publish before then.  It was a dark time in my career where I faced the extent of my difficulties with the technicalities of writing.

From here, I moved on to Novel Factory.  I LOVE the structure and use Novel Factory for even short stories.  The format of Novel Factory pleases me more than Scrivener did.  Novel Factory has a basic spellcheck that keeps me from being overwhelmed by all my terrible spelling all at once. I still have to bring all my chapters over to the web editor on ProWritingAid, but I’m less overwhelmed.

Like Nimble, Novel Factory has space for character profiles and places in my fictional work, but it goes further and allows me to write out an entire story arc and attach pictures to characters/places.  Novel Factory also has space for multiple drafts of the same work, and I can compare two very different edits for some time without losing either.  There‘s also a place to track submissions within the software.

My main gripe is that the italics in Novel Factory do not carry over to Word, ProWritingAid, or Google Docs.  I have to run back through every copy and look for what I meant to italic.  *sigh* Nothing is hassle free for a writer.  At least it‘s simpler to adapt than handwritten manuscripts?

Talk to me!  What software do you use to write your stories?  What do you like about the software?  Is there anything you’d like to change regarding your current technique?

Editing: The Gnat of Writing

image from open clipart.org by Firkin

Recently, I've been writing more quick articles and reviews.  In the past I posted them with no grammar check because I'm not married to any of these little blurbs and editing is exhausting.  If I have to spend hours checking every little thing, I'll never get content out.  All bloggers, writers, and curators know lack of content is a death knell for our livelihoods.  I can't be relevant without constant production.

During this revival, I've realized that having sound content may be as important as having consistent content.  My "personal brand" can't be littered with typos.  What sane editor wants to deal with that?

My blog may be the only time someone sees my writing.  If they don't like the tone and structure in a small informational blog: how will I get them to read a short story or a novel?

To combat my slipshod internal voice, I'm using ProWritingAid on all my blog posts, book reviews, and stories.  This wasn't an easy decision for me because I'm resistant to editing.  It takes longer to edit than it does to write.  It's draining, and it makes me question my ability to be a published writer.  Who would put up with all my little mistakes when there are so many authors who must have a more sophisticated grasp of proper grammar?

Surprise, I don't hate running everything through a grammar check as much as I'd imagined.  There are points that hearten me even.

1. The editing process takes less time the more often I do it.

2. I think my grammar is better.  I'm catching myself more before I hit the editor.

3. I have basic serious mistakes that are crippling my work.

-Example one, I can't keep capitalization consistent for shit.  Don't know why I can't decide if I'm creating a title or if something is a proper noun, but my capitalization consistency is terrible.  It takes a stupid amount of time for me to do a consistency.  No wonder an editor doesn't want to pick me up.  What a flipping nightmare.

-Example two: I can't stick to writing numbers out or typing the word down.  Thankfully, this won't riddle my creative writing but it's all over the blog and I wonder if it exhausts readers.

-Example three: I use two or more adjectives that mean the same thing.  At one point in time, I thought using so many adjectives controlled the tone and drove the reader to my conclusion.  Now I see I'm holding too tight to the reins.

-Example four: I have too many sentence fragments.  This one is the most difficult.  My storytelling style borders on the poetic.  Fragments belong in my work.  But, I may rely too on flow to instill story.

-Example five: I don't use article a or the half as much as ProWritingAid believes I should.  This one I'm still fighting the good fight.  A and the are unnecessary and take away from the tone I want to achieve.  Who knows, maybe the repetitive nature of the feedback will change my mind?

Now that editing takes less time, and I can catch mistakes before I use a check, I resent the process less.  Part of me looks forward to editing because it means I'm one step closer to submitting.

What about you?  Is editing less daunting over time?  Do you have common foils you need to overcome in your writing?  Speak up ^_^