Second draft progress:

[mistressofmuses]

This week so far, I've been plugging away at the second draft of All Strange Wonders. I hit my 500 word goal every day since Sunday! Though I realized... with the first draft clocking in at 69,000+ words, 500 a day won't get me that far that fast. Eek. Gonna have to step it up!

Last night I managed 1500 words, so that much was a success! I'm going to aim for at least 1000, and hopefully more, tonight.

Granted, this is second draft, so it's mostly just rewriting what I already have, which is faster going. I am actually rewriting it though, rather than just editing the existing draft. Most of it so far has been fairly word-for-word, but I'm also changing a fair amount. I have a list of overarching plot details (timelines, geography, etc.) that I want to make sure are consistent, plus some subplots that I discovered/created partway through the first draft and I want to work into the story from the beginning. I'd identified some pacing issues that I'm hoping to fix, which will involve writing some new scenes. I'm also tightening up some of the writing, especially since the first chunk of this was written during NaNoWriMo, where I definitely didn't go back to edit as I went!

The advice of "rewrite your drafts, don't just try to fix it in the first draft document" is very solid advice, imo. Even when you don't *plan* to change much, the number of times you'll rework a sentence, or add a bit of description is surprising. (Or at least it is for me!) I sort of "discovered" how valid the advice was just from typing up things that I'd written in notebooks, so I *had* to transcribe them into a word doc. And I realized just how much I changed, and how much I feel like it improved.

Prior to that, I'm not sure. I don't think I did much rewriting, and usually did just go through my first draft and do an editing pass. While I would fix wording or add description and such, I didn't do so to nearly the extent I do when I write it all out again.

~

No real news on my grandmother. Last my mom talked to her, she said she still sounded really good. My aunt was supposed to fly up there either yesterday or today, can't remember which, but I haven't heard anything more. They'll be flying back in a few days, and then we're still planning on driving down next Wednesday. We'll come back Sunday. I'll have to have a negative covid test to return to work, but should be able to do that on Monday.

Comments

[galadhir]

Oh that's interesting about rewriting. The prospect of rewriting anything tends to make me shrivel up and die, but then I do a very slow and careful initial draft, ignoring all the advice not to write and edit at the same time. Maybe I'll try it though, if it makes a huge improvement.

I'm glad there's no bad news. I hope it continues that way and you get a good visit :)

[mistressofmuses]

Huge grain of salt for any of my advice: I am *very* much a hobby writer, not a professional, so nothing I do is necessarily helpful for publication-quality work, or what a pro full-time writer would do.

But I find the rewriting really helpful! Too often when I write anything more than a few thousand words, I discover something later that I wished I'd included from the start. (A theme that I notice, or a subplot that would help flesh out a character, or something like that. Or I realize I want to change something drastically: a character's backstory, the geography of the setting, I decide to get rid of a character entirely...) Doing a rewrite lets me fix that kind of stuff after I have a vague "whole picture" look at the first draft, so I don't have to *keep* going back every time I think of a new change. (Or sometimes after I have that whole picture look, I realize one of those ideas was crap and I shouldn't add it after all, haha.)

Plus I find myself a lot more willing to make small tweaks to word choice or dialogue. When I edit as I go, I keep a lot of things as-is, as long as they're okay. But when I'm retyping anyway, it's easier to make those small adjustments. The pain of retyping so much of it is (for me at least) outweighed by how much less I stress about making those adjustments.

About 80-90% of it stays the same, and really is just me having the two documents side-by-side and retyping the text from the first draft. (I'm not doing a harsh "cut everything non-vital and start over" draft; this is for fun!) But that 10-20% where I change dialogue or add in description or sneak in some foreshadowing is a lot of fun for me!

[galadhir]

I definitely see how retyping would make the second draft more malleable. I do have a problem with editing in that there's a huge feeling of set-in-stone-ness to the words that are already on the page. I might try it for the next thing I do (whenever that is) and see how it goes. I can always go back to not doing it if it doesn't work for me :)

[mistressofmuses]

I hope it works for you!

[scarlipswolfwife]

Crossing my fingers for your grandmother and that you have a safe and wonderful visit when you go. *hugshugs*

[mistressofmuses]

Thank you! My aunt texted a bit ago and said she's still doing well today. *hugs*

[spikedluv]

I handwrite my fic, first, too, and it is really surprising how much you catch when you're typing it in!

I hope you're able to have a nice visit with your grandmother.

[mistressofmuses]

Absolutely! I do type faster than I write by hand, so *mostly* I type up my first drafts. But I've found that if I'm struggling, sometimes switching to handwriting makes it easier. And retyping it helps me so much with editing.

Thank you.