I’m cooking right along on the second draft of SEVEN STARS. In fact, I’m about twice as far right now as the goal I set myself for this week (Friday-Thursday. I update my goals once a week on Fridays on Hatrack River Writer’s Workshop and once a month on Farland’s Writers Groups.) That’s good in a lot of ways.
What I call second drafts usually take two or three passes because I’m looking for different things.
- On the first pass I’m usually fixing or adding things I knew I left out on the first draft. Sometimes, that’s because I had trouble with a particular scene so I just told it, made a note to fix it, and moved on. The first draft is just about getting the story down, not about getting all the fine details perfect. Sometimes, it’s something else that I noted in the first draft–a large chunk of dialog that would need to be broken up with some beats and some internal thoughts. And sometimes it’s something that I discovered was more important than I expected later in the first draft and so I knew I needed to do a bit of foreshadowing earlier. This pass can take some time, because there’s often a lot of new writing in it.
- Sometimes, the second pass is aimed at the side characters, especially the antagonist. My first draft tends to be very protagonist-centric. There’s a little, but not too much of that in this story since the antagonists tend to be less tangible. So, this time, that pass got rolled in with the next.
- The next pass is more detailed, but still might go faster. I’m looking for places where I need more internal thoughts or more description. I’m also smoothing out places that might feel a little rough to me. New material gets added here, too (I’m about to write a new scene when I get back to work, now.), but less than in the first pass.
After all of that, hopefully, the story is as good as I can make it until I get some feedback on what works–and what doesn’t–from my alpha readers. That’s scheduled for next month.
Interesting procedure you have there. Sounds like it takes a while but if it gets it done for you, that’s good. Mine method is usually a lot less complicated even though I do some of what you do but it’s all mixed together… whatever I see that needs work. Part of that is because sometimes I will redo a scene as I am writing even if that scene was in the last chapter.
But I said usually less complicated. One novel, “New mage One The Block”, that I’m still working on will need extra work on the revision. I need to redo the second and third chapters. I may end up starting from scratch to get what I want into the them and what I don’t want out of them. I introduce a close friend of my MC and add some stuff about the challenges my MC had growing up with special abilities she couldn’t control. I may add a couple of incidences. The rest of it, I think, is pretty much what I want. I may make some minor changes here and there but I already put in everything. It’s possible that I could find something that needs something more than a minor change but I might not.
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Yeah, everybody has to find their own method. I don’t go back, other than to make a quick note, during the first draft.
This part, at least, seems to be working well for me so far.
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