Reaching the Goal

I'm thrilled to announce that I met my November writing goal today, completing the second draft of my current work-in-progress. I must say, the experience taught me a lot, since I've never revised a novel before. In case it proves helpful to others struggling with revising an unwieldy first draft, here are the key lessons I learned:

Know thyself. I am a terrible procrastinator, I'll admit it right now. (Or maybe later.) I set myself a deadline to complete this revision during the month of November. I got through a little more than half the novel and hit a big fat brick wall. The wall didn't move for a good two weeks or more. On Black Friday, after stuffing myself with leftover pumpkin pie, it occurred to me that I had three days left in the month and few other demands on my time. I figured out that if I averaged seven chapters a day, I could still meet the goal; this seemed entirely feasible. I got re-energized (why else do we procrastinate, except that we love the mad dash towards the finish line?) and made it happen.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses as writers. If you're honest with yourself about what they are, you can leverage the former against the latter to avoid your own pitfalls.

Don't give up. Churchill said it best - doesn't he always? "If you are going through hell, keep going." I think he was probably referring to WWII, or possibly the Boer War, but regardless, the adage works here too. While it's not quite as traumatic as war, revising your writing tends to be hellish more often than not. Difficult choices present themselves. I want the work to be phenomenal, but am I going the right way to get there? This is the question.

That big fat brick wall I hit? In the first draft, I'd written some chapters in first person and some in third person. I had to make a narrative choice and stick with it. Guess who deeply questioned that choice just over halfway through the second draft? I agonized for a good two weeks before deciding, "What the hell," and telling myself to just get on with it. If the end result sucked, well, I'd just proved to myself I could take massive amounts of writing and make titchy subject & verb tense changes throughout it. I could always do it again, but I wanted to finish this draft first, maybe to see how it went, maybe just because I'm stubborn, maybe a little of both. By the end of the revision, I felt like I'd made the right choice after all, and even developed cogent-sounding arguments as to why my narrative choice better supported the story. (At least, I'd like to think they sound cogent.)

It's rough, no doubt. When you care this much about something, a bad roadblock can make you question the entire project, and it's tempting to walk away and start anew. I think the key is to not give up midway through your decision; carry it through to the end before you determine if it's unworthy. It's dangerous to try and judge only part of the picture.

Identify the issues before you start fixing things. Granted, things will pop up along the way, and you should address some of those too. But you already know what huge, glaring plot holes you blithely skipped over on that first go-round, or that you were going to have to do some serious web-surfing to write accurately about raising goats in Greece, or what have you. Hopefully, you had at least two or three readers provide you with feedback, and you've read it through yourself (resisting the urge to launch into revision right then, which is so hard, isn't it?). I actually made a list of the issues I wanted to fix and the questions I had to face, so I could approach them more effectively. I'm definitely more of a pantser when it comes to the first draft, but I think the more structured & organized approach to the second draft is what got me through it.

Plan on a next draft. We tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves when we write. (Go ahead, call me Captain Obvious.) You don't have to make it perfect right now, just better. Knowing this helped me a lot. I confess I took refuge in focusing on the technicalities for much of this draft, except for changing and dropping a couple parts of the plot that just didn't feel right - and that I felt capable of fixing there and then. If I ran into something that was still too overwhelming to tackle, I left it for the third draft without even a twinge of guilt. I stayed plenty busy fixing other massive problems, the ones I'd planned on dealing with. Like my mom says, "Eat the elephant one bite at a time."