A Change in Perspective

I wrote my novel over the course of a year, edited it, sent it out to agents, realized how to make it a million times better by rewriting over half of it (much, much more than half of it I realize as I'm writing it), and started over.

I wrote about half of the book, realized I was trying to incorporate too much of the first version into the second, and have just this week gotten past the revision of that change and back to the actual writing of the novel.

And I'm noticing a big difference in how I'm writing.

When I wrote the book the first time, I actually started out each day of writing rereading the previous chapters and editing before continuing on. I did that until I had written enough that it simply wasn't feasible, and gave that up. But I did worry about each chapter. As I wrote, I would reread each paragraph and swap out words, rephrase sentences, and just generally try to polish it up as I was writing it. Which makes sense from my writing experiences before that. I am someone who never actually did the three drafts of my school essays, because they were only, what, five pages long or so, and I could easily write it polished and save myself some time.

Writing books is not like that. And that first version of this story was written with that point of view.

This time around, it isn't.

The last chapter I finished, I know is going to need a lot of polishing. I feel like there may have been too much description and not enough dialogue. I know there were times when I used the same word too many times too close together. I feel like I had the main character rushing around seeing too many people in the last few paragraphs.

And I am not going to give it a second thought. Not while I'm writing my first draft.

Because books change as you write them. Stories have a life of their own, and you can be writing away and then look back in surprise at what the characters just did because that is not what you had planned on them doing. But of course, it is what they should have done, so you shrug and move on.

There is a lot of revision that goes into writing a novel. Like, an unbelievable amount. You finish your first draft and have a merry celebration, and then you have to buckle down and make it perfect. And perfect is a whole lot of work.

With my first version, I had my second draft, which consisted of my going through the first one and changing all the parts that had wandered off on their own later on and made earlier passage nonsensical. I had made a list of chapters as I wrote, with a brief description of each one, which I later returned to to make sure that this person picked up this apparently inconsequential item, or this building was described in a way that would make the changes in chapter thirty make sense. And there were a lot of those.

My third draft was me going through and just reading the second draft and checking things like grammar and flow and seeing how it felt to read through it, bit by bit.

My fourth draft was me actually setting aside an entire day to spend eight hours reading the thing through from start to finish, finding inconsistencies and fixing them.

Then I handed the book off to kind and loving people to read through and give me their feedback. Which I only got on probably less than a third of the book if at all, but still, feedback is feedback (I have a couple of different people lined up for feedback this time around, so hopefully they'll manage to complete this version so I can know what the entire book is like).

Then I revised again based on their feedback. I can't remember if I revised twice after hearing from them or if it was just the one time, but I certainly had five or six drafts by the time I felt it was good enough to try to get published.

So this time around, I understand that it really doesn't matter if chapter twenty-three needs a lot of polishing. Because each and every chapter will undergo so many drafts before it is actually a completed, polished work. A few relatively minor issues in one chapter is nothing.

The important thing is to keep at it and complete the first draft, so I can move on to the next ones.