How many drafts is too many? Currently I’m pushing the limit on what that number should be, but the good news is I’m over the hump that hindered me in previous attempts.
Bear with me a sec while I throw an info-dump at you.
In 2014-2015, I wrote the first draft of novel. Since then, there have been three failed attempts at getting a 2nd draft off the ground. Now, most rational people would probably give up on the project after that, and since I like to pretend I’m a rational person, that’s exactly what I did. I moved on, and spent my time piecing together several short stories and outlining a couple potential projects.
What I didn’t anticipate was that the work I would do on those short stories and outlining would lead me to reexamine my entire editing and revising process. Through this reexamination, I was able to diagnose the reasons for why the 2nd draft attempts on the novel failed:
- I had a long laundry list of things I wanted to change from draft 1, a lot of which were major changes that would require some serious overhaul;
- My previous method of 2nd draft editing consisted of me literally typing out the whole manuscript again, inserting the changes I wanted to make, using the 1st draft merely as a reference point.
With those two things in mind, I decided to delve back into the novel and make a 4th attempt at the 2nd draft, with a few very distinct changes to the above roadblocks:
- I scaled back massively on the changes I wanted to make, opting instead to keep a lot of the 1st draft elements intact while inserting minor (and a very few major) changes where necessary;
- I’m editing on the original 1st draft word document, with track changes turned on so I can follow my progress.
So, how do I know this was a good idea? Well, I don’t. And I won’t know until I finish this 2nd draft (if I finish the 2nd draft, but I might have to kill myself if I don’t (not really, of course; I’m not that fatalistic)). But I’ve already made it further in this iteration of the 2nd draft than in all my previous attempts. And unlike those previous attempts, I’m not sitting here drowning in regret and self-doubt regarding what I’ve written and edited so far. It’s a pleasant place to be, and I’m hoping it’s down to the changes I’ve made in my process, particularly on the “editing on the word doc” front.
The editing is still going slower than I’d like, but I haven’t burned out and don’t feel in danger of doing so, which is always welcomed. I’m also confident the speed of my editing will pick up soon for one specific reason: the tense of the first draft.
When I first started writing the 1st draft, I decided to use present tense. This I attribute to the fact that I read City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett right before I started writing, and since City of Stairs is written in present tense, I made the conscious decision to give it a shot to see how I liked it. But about a third of the way through the 1st draft, I realized present tense just wasn’t conveying the right tone and feel I was going for and thus I made the shift to past tense, which I used through to the completion of the novel.
Now that I’m in the 2nd draft, I need to ensure I use the same tense (past, in this case) throughout the whole novel, but since I’m developing that by editing the 1st draft word doc, it means virtually every sentence in the first sections requires revision. Says becomes said, asks becomes asked, looks becomes looked, and so on and so forth.
Good news is I’m almost to the end of the present tense portion of the draft, so that aspect of my revision will be disappearing soon. Bad news is I have a major story change shortly thereafter, so the hard work won’t be done just yet (is it ever really?). But I’m confident in my ability and my tenacity, and besides, it’s not my first time on the editing roller coaster, though it might become the first time I truly love what comes out of it.
Bradley C. Graham 