It’s been a while since I updated you on my Secret New Novel progress, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been hard at work.
Back in December I reached a crucial point with my novel: I finished the Second Draft that I started back in August. The Second Draft solved a LOT of the problems that were plaguing the First Draft, which was really rough and full of holes. The Second Draft, in contrast, eliminated some unnecessary scenes, fleshed out a lot of vague ideas, and ironed out some major issues that made the rough First Draft, well, rough.
After finishing the Second Draft I took a two-week break for Christmas and New Years, which I also spent getting caught up on miscellaneous projects, tasks, and cleaning. This was also important because it gave me some space away from the novel and helped me come back to it in January with a fresh perspective.
And that fresh perspective was incredibly helpful.
From Major Edits to Minor Revisions
Working through the Third Draft has been a rewarding experience. While some chapters (particularly at the beginning) still needed major rewrites and entire paragraphs added in, most chapters didn’t, and working on these chapters involved a lot of line-level editing that’s both easier and faster to work through.
Not only is this kind of editing faster, it’s also less stressful. That means that sitting down to write in the mornings feels easier, and I’m less likely to have bad days than when I was writing the earlier drafts because I know the novel better and start the day feeling confident that I’ll have relatively smooth sailing ahead.
Editing a novel is in some ways like memorizing lines for a play: during your first few readthroughs, the task feels intimidating and foreign as you stumble through a tangle of words. The longer you work with the material, though, the easier it gets, so after a while you learn to work with smaller details like finer-tuned ideas and sentence tweaks that would have been unthinkable when you were just getting acquainted with the material.
Making a Plan, One Chapter at a Time
And I mean that quite literally.
Whereas in the Second Draft I found myself editing through an average of one chapter every two writing days, once I overcome the initial hurdles in Chapters 1-4, I found it easy to get through one chapter every writing day, which is a HUGE increase in productivity that also makes it easier to plan.
The one chapter per day isn’t an exact science, of course: just yesterday I started on an 18-page chapter that needed a bit more TLC, and only made it through 15 pages before I had to call it a day. That wasn’t a problem, though, because when I sat down again to write this morning I just finished up the remaining three pages, then worked through the next entire chapter, which was not only shorter, but in better shape. So, it’s been relatively easy to stick to my One Chapter Per Day plan.
About the time I reached the halfway point I realized I wanted to start planning for my next steps, namely, sending the finished Third Draft off to Beta Readers while I work on the Fourth Draft. I realized that if I stuck to my One Chapter Per Day plan I could pinpoint an exact day that I’d be done with revisions, which is exactly what I did.
In my trusty Schedule Book, I marked down which days per week I’d be working on my novel and which chapter I planned on finishing each day. I planned out three weeks of writing this way and found that if all went well, I’d finish the Third Draft on Monday, February 27th, just in time for the end of the month.
And that’s pretty awesome.
Of Course, There’s Also the Typing…
I did, however, leave out one little detail: because I make all of my revisions using a pen and printed copies of each chapter, I also have to type all of that up.
This can take a long time: for severe revisions it can take as long as 10 minutes per page, which translates to more than three hours for a 20-page chapter. Lately I’ve been averaging about 7 minutes per page (or just over two hours for a 20-page chapter), and while I fully expect that number to go down even more as I move forward, the time still adds up.
Here’s the dirty little secret, though: Do you see that super-tall stack of paper in the cover photo? That’s all the revisions that still need typing up, including the last of the Second Draft revisions that aren’t actually on the computer yet.
That means that the final chapters I plan to print and revise for the Third Draft don’t even exist in digital form yet, so I have to keep pace with the typing so I can also make my revising quota. D’oh!
Fortunately I’ve made a plan for this by setting aside time for Second Draft typing a few evenings a week so I can stay 2-3 days ahead of the game. When I type up revisions I like to listen to music without thinking too much about the words going on to the page, and the end of the day is perfect for this relatively simple task.
As I write this post, it occurs to me that it might be a waste of time to type up a whole bunch of Second Draft revisions knowing that I’m just going to revise them again a few days later. Would it make more sense, I wonder, to revise the Third Draft directly on the computer, or using the pen-and-paper revisions I already have? While this would save a lot of time, I simply don’t work as well this way, and don’t think the result would be as good as I want it to be. So, I consider the extra typing time to be time well spent.
I’m Almost There…
As I said, the Third Draft is the first version of the novel that I’ll be sending to Beta Readers outside my usual writing group (!), so if I’ve talked to you about reading an early copy, keep an eye on your inbox!
For the rest of you reading this, I’m almost, almost ready to share what this Secret New Novel is actually about—and I guarantee it won’t disappoint! Thanks for following me on this crazy journey and reading about my (at times) unbelievably slow progress—your support and interest really means a lot!!!