I’ve probably said it before, but the second draft is SO much more fun than the first draft. You are God and you can put everything right in Creation. And Creation is made up of hundreds of puzzle pieces, and if a piece doesn’t fit you GO BACK and change things so it fits.
I still don’t know why I don’t go back to bad oil painting and recreate them too, but I don’t. If I did anyway, it wouldn’t be fun. It would be unraveling and re-knitting a sweater.
Like recently, I had two pages in which I have the heroine explains her complicated fix to a physical problem, and the explanation comes as she’s drawing someone a diagram. Slooooow. Difficult. Killed the flow. And short of drawing the diagram on the actual page, I couldn’t see how to fix it, until I realized I was in her head, I could just have her figure it out in one paragraph and scribble it out in far less detail in the next. Two paragraphs, not two pages.
Fixing that was so fun. So much more fun than re-painting. It’s the re-assembly: you don’t get that in painting. You can take what you have and re-use it, only better. And maybe it’s because you can use the mistakes for good, maybe that’s why I like it.
6,000 more words and Draft 2 is done.
10 responses to “Rewriting the Novel: Fun”
I approve of the second draft being fun! 🙂 Obviously, not every part of a creative endeavor is going to be fun, generally, but enjoy whatever *can* be enjoyed, and maybe more of it will show up. 🙂
KC – well, this most recent chapter is missing acres of plot. i’m having to build from the ground up for that. I find myself cheating in this chapter and playing with more-finished chapters instead.
But if you know where you’re starting in the chapter and where you have to end up (and what needs to be communicated), that sounds like a situation that can likely be mostly solved with Post-It Notes and brainstorming?
But yes. Less fun than making adjustments and turning things brilliant out of nowhere with great rapidity. But! It will be so satisfying to have a draft that you know doesn’t have any holes left in it, so there is that?
But if you know where you’re starting in the chapter and where you have to end up (and what needs to be communicated), that sounds like a situation that can likely be mostly solved with Post-It Notes and brainstorming?
But yes. Less fun than making adjustments and turning things brilliant out of nowhere with great rapidity. But! It will be so satisfying to have a draft that you know doesn’t have any holes left in it, so there is that?
KC – I suppose. Still I was hoping I would be done with draft 2 by now and I am not. I can’t imagine what people do who have real deadlines.
I did tech work at a publishing company for a while. Half the answer is that the vast majority of them do not meet their deadlines; the other half the answer is that when you have a deadline, you alter the work/schedule to fit the deadline, to some degree – either working longer hours or discarding things that would be good to do but not absolutely necessary to do, etc.
(and the third part of the answer in between those two halves is: I have no idea, either, and I haaaaate missing deadlines and also haaaaate shortchanging a project, so I shouldn’t be an author.)
KC – I can’t imagine people wouldn’t make their deadlines. They’ve already been paid an advance, right? Or is that part of the problem?
It just… happens. There may be a penalty in some cases, but in general it is understood that this is the way it is with books/authors. (that said, writers who make their deadlines have more going for them than writers who do not. Also timing just doesn’t really *matter* with probably really the bulk of books – when it is done, it will be printed and sold and there isn’t a giant launch party that is scheduled a year in advance – so yes, you want it to come out when you originally calculate would be the best place for it to have its birthday [usually based on lower competition or on various extrinsic schedules] but it’s not *urgent* really.)
Okay, also publishers build this into their schedule to begin with (kind of like how you might schedule a coffee with 3pm with someone and assume it will actually be 3:30pm when they show up). and also they have fast-turnaround copyeditors (who cost more) and slower-turnaround copyedtiors (who cost less) and find ways of compressing the schedule sometimes when they really need to. But mostly: probably 95% or more of books do not *need* to come out on time, and then there are various tactics editors use in the case of books that do need to come out on time. (there are some fabulous stories; I do not know how many are exaggerated, however)
KC – I read in Bird by Bird that she delivered a draft that did not please her editor, and he threatened to take her advance back. Does that happen often?
That’s something I don’t know! (also I do not know if the editor could legally have followed through on that) But also a lot of books don’t get an advance, so there is that. She’s a big enough name to get advances, though! I am not sure if she’s a big enough name to get a tightly-scheduled-a-year-in-advance release date, though.