Operation Story Revision has just hit Chapter 4. I honestly thought I'd be further along by now. After all, I got Chapter 1 rewritten in a day.
Or so I thought.
After rereading what I wrote, I decided that it was a weak opening. To fix this, I went back and added a prologue, using something I hadn't mentioned until later in the original draft. Then I decided the prologue needed some work to make it more interesting.
This made the first chapter seem even weaker, so I had to tweak it again. Finally, I hit Chapter 2.
You guessed it, Chapter 2 meant I had to tweak Chapter 1 again. And I rearranged parts of the new prologue.
I just finished Chapter 3 - or a version of Chapter 3 I choose to live with - and am doing my darnedest to keep from going back and nitpicking the previous two chapters and the prologue.
This is the kind of behavior that has kept me from finishing a second draft in ages.
I often think I'd do better if I had some sort of outline. A nice chapter-by-chapter overview of what I want to happen. I even tried it once.
Did it work?
I'll let you know if I find the outline. And the story it was associated with.
They say that editing is a process. One cannot think of a story in editing in the same way one thinks of it during its original creation. The first draft is the rough sketch, maybe the color study. Editing polishes it for public consumption, filling in details and removing tangents and perfecting composition. The final picture may vary radically from the rough sketch, but only as a result of the revisions; it doesn't do to keep going back and scratching away at a sketchpad when one has a canvas to fill with paint. At some point, the sketchpad has to go away, or at least be relegated to spot-sketches to solve specific problems that crop up in the polishing process, and the canvas itself must be tackled. So, I've been trying to think of editing the story as I'd think of drawing a picture, moving from the gesture studies of the NaNoWriMo-spawned rough draft to - hopefully - a presentable work of art.
Unfortunately, I haven't finished a picture in ages, either...
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1 comment:
Keep going! Editing is a process, but keep chugging right along through and you'll get to the end. It sounds like you are outside of the sketchbook a little bit and putting the first touches on the canvas to me.
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