Thursday, July 10, 2008

Second Draft

It's been started! And it feels really good.
I wrote 2K yesterday with ease, and could have pushed myself on but I want to pace myself this time around, get into writing between 1.5K-2K per day without fail, and set up more of a habit and less of the 'full steam ahead!' attitude that accompanies novel-in-a-month challenges.
It's strange that this particular word count goal seems like something so incredibly attainable now, a few months back it would have daunted me beyond belief, but now, I know I can do it.

And, against all my thoughts and beliefs, writing this second draft doesn't feel 'hard'. Before now I had only really approached short stories for editing and rewrites, and they are so different than a whole novel. I have rewritten short stories before, and not usually been that happy with the outcome - so the idea of rewriting an entire novel just scared the hell out of me. When I first looked at editing this particular novel I was trying to find ways to expand it, I was working out the best way to break it up and then add everything into it that I wanted added in, and cut all the bits out that I no longer wanted in the story. It was hard, such hard work - but I was telling myself that it would be much easier than rewriting the whole thing.

I think I was wrong. I feel now like I have the skills (magically appearing from nowhere apparently) to rewrite this novel, while still keeping in tact the bits of the original that I wanted to. Perhaps it's just that I have enough distance from it now - really enough distance, not just thinking that I do - to say that no, I don't need to keep the exact words or lines or order of the original, to know that the story I wanted to tell will be told, that it will just be in a slightly different (better, longer) form.

It's not like my characters are going to change much, if anything they are becoming more of who they are and should be. The story line for the most part will remain the same with some really great changes. So it's not nearly as drastic as I am sure a lot of rewrites are when whole chunks of the story are changed dramatically. And by working with it in this way, through a total rewrite, I can enjoy it all again.

That was really the thing I was worrying about I think, that I was going to be bored, that I wouldn't finish a rewrite because I already knew what was going to happen. And while yes, I do have a very good idea, I am allowing for some movement in the story, and I am sure that there are elements in there that will be new to me, and the depth of detail and character development this time around are also going to be something new as well. I'm not writing this in a month, not trying to cram as much story into as short a space as I possibly can.

I was talking to my mother a couple nights ago about what I'll be working on with the novel, and she is of the opinion I should just have submitted it ages ago and it should have been published already. I told her that yes, it's a solid story, and yes I know a lot of people enjoyed it - but the point is that it's not the best story it can be, and if I want to have any chance of getting it published that is exactly what it needs to be. It's about peeling back the layers that I already have and seeing which ones need adding to and which ones need removing, about crafting the thing instead of just drafting it.

I feel more like a 'writer' this week than I have in a long time. I'm moving from being a first draft novelist onto being somewhere else in the process of novelling, and that's exciting, so very much so. I'm really looking forward to this new kind of journey, and I feel renewed and nourished by it, and strangely, not fearful anymore - I know I can do right by my novel.

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