A few days ago, I wrote 'The End' on my second manuscript. For the first time in three and a half years, I don't have a project in draft mode. I no longer have daily word counts to add to my tracker every evening. Frankly, I don't know what to do with my hands!
That's not to say that there aren't other stories I could write. I have at least ten in the world of Nalavaris alone (my epic and expansive fantasy series) and at least three stand alone romances, already outlined and in different states of my process. They will each come to fruition in their own time, no doubt, because the drafting process is my favorite part. I absolutely love spending time living and exploring the worlds of my stories and lives of my characters during the writing process. I thrive on the creativity of it all.
In fact, I thrive on it so much, and I am self aware enough to know that I will happily start drafting another story in an effort to avoid the next step of the process. My goal is to become a published author. I want to see my name on the books in peoples shelves. I want to take my readers on adventures to beautiful worlds where empowered women leave legacies that are honored for generations.
Unfortunately, I will never get there if all I do is draft, because the real work starts once you've wrote 'the end'. I have two completed manuscripts now, and I am faced with the part of the process that intimidates me the most: editing and revision. While I understand the process, and even know how to break it down into tiny pieces so that the process itself is less overwhelming, I am still struggling with a huge amount of resistance. Where's the fun in looking at everything I did wrong? Where's the fun in finding the glaring plot holes that I need to logic my way through, the obvious open loops that I need to give a satisfying close to?
I've never truly edited and revised a draft before. For my fantasy novel, I simply started a new draft with the fixes in my head and rewrote the entire thing with the fixes included. I did that three times over now, yet I am no closer to having a publishable book than when I finished my messy first draft in January of last year. When I finished the third rewrite, I needed to step away from the project for a little bit because I realized that drafting wasn't improving the story anymore. I decided to spend at least a month drafting something new entirely, in a different genre no less, completely removed from the fantasy world of Nalavaris.
That month turned into two and a half months of near daily writing. I already had the story 'thrown down' (incidentally, my favorite part of the process) and spent three days building and organizing the plot line in my plotting software, so the only thing left to do was write the story. I tackled that process differently than I had wrote my fantasy novel, writing scene by scene instead of trying to write chapters. Except for a brief week where I took an hour and a half every evening to read through my first manuscript and take notes of every single thing wrong with it chapter by chapter, I didn't think about Isolda or Nalavaris for the whole time I was drafting the second manuscript.
Turns out, that is exactly what I needed. A true palate cleanser! I loved the characters so much that I couldn't help but pour all my heart and focus into getting their story on the page. When I typed 'the end' at the bottom of the last scene of that second manuscript, I learned three things at once: First, that I can write a romance (though I never had any interest previously), second, that I improved my process by working with my brain rather than trying to follow some process that I've seen others do, and third, that I had a rediscovered my love for my first manuscript again!
So, now that I am taking a month away from the second manuscript that I just finished, it is time for these fresh eyes to revisit Nalavaris, and this time, I'm not going to start a whole new draft and hope it works. No, this time I am actually going to put in the important work of editing and revising, step by tiny step. Fix the things that need fixing, pretty up the bland prose, and face the scary part head on. This is the beginning of bringing The Weaver's Understudy to the world.
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