I’ve been focused on writing over the summer and have not been posting here. My attention was on the writing, and I think I have made some good progress and finish a first draft. For this initial writing effort, I found I needed to just write and couldn’t divide my attention. Now I hope to share some details on my novel.
I don’t know if many authors really write completely new drafts these days. With my book saved on my DropBox account, the second draft is more of a detailed review of the first draft instead of starting over with blank pages. There are some advantages to this. As I wrote the first draft, I added detailed comments on things to clarify later. I addressed these items as I went through the pages.
My second draft was basically a developmental edit of the story. I tightened up the plot to make it flow chronologically. This is the basic plot, told in first person by Sinapa. It makes up most of the text. Before writing, I had the first two thirds clear in my head, but the last third and the ending evolved as I was writing them.
I also worked on the secondary plot of the story, occurring in a different location at the same time as the main plot. This is in third person. Right now, I have these parts in italics separated from the basic plot by a space in the main chapters. It will be important to get this structure right. I could include these segments as short chapters, but some are just a few paragraphs, and I don’t want to refer to them as chapters. I’m not sure about this yet.
Now that the structure is complete, I am working on line editing, going through each line to check on sentence structure. I wasn’t this thorough on my other books and stories. It is a slow process, but I think this means I am doing it right. I am doing things like getting rid of unnecessary adjectives and adverbs and also trying to make the dialogue more natural. So far, I have editing 60 pages out of 263. To give you an idea of the where the book is now, I am using Microsoft Word, and Times New Roman, size 12.
I am happy with 83262 words for now. Before starting, I thought it might go to at least 100,000, but the story is the story, and I won’t add pages just for the sake of reaching a higher number. One thing about my word count does have me a bit concerned: as I go through this editing process, I find I am not reducing the total, and it is actually going up a bit. I am definitely getting rid of words in each paragraph and probably most sentences. It always feels good to find and eliminate words; however for this draft I am adding sentences too. I think these additions are needed, but I generally think effective editing results in fewer total words, so I will just have to see what happens.
This book is leading me through this process, but I am a bit curious about how it will look when I am finished. I think this comes down to trusting in your creativity; some of it is controlled and focused, but a big part of creativity is just letting go.
I’ve also been thinking about my title. Up until a few days ago, I was sure it would be Calusa Gold, but now I am not sure. More on that in my next post.
What are your feelings about structure and point of view? Please let me know what you think about this and my other posts. Thanks for reading.
Way to go! Sounds productive!
It sounds like a solid process to me. You might find, if you do a third draft, you will drill the words down again. Mine is a many-draft long-haul. I am still more in an additive phase - with some passages, even scenes, not yet written, but I am always looking for places to cut, whether words, or moments, so my total word count may not change drastically from this point.