Fall down seven times, get up eight, says my horoscope.

[owlectomy]

I was really encouraged to read that Sarah Rees Brennan had written an entire version of the sequel to The Demon's Lexicon which she had to throw out and start from scratch on. Because Sparks and Ashes has been... interesting. And I suspect that I should not have started on it until I had a better idea of what was going on, but I had a very definite idea in my mind about getting a first draft finished by X date, a second draft finished by Y date, etc.

First attempt--I had taken away the protagonist's ability to protag and placed her in a situation where the smartest thing to do was keep her head down and do what she was told. And I had cut her off from a friendship that was supposed to be really important to her.

Second attempt--Too Much Boarding School, which is deadly after Harry Potter, and introduced a plot implausibility: if any significant number of people can do magic, there shouldn't be anything really crucial about the protagonist being willing to participate or not.

Third attempt--I finally had most of my pieces in order, namely, realizing that three of my characters were actually siblings, putting my protagonist in an individual-tutoring situation that only cut her off a little from her best friend, getting the romance storyline pretty much on target. This was almost a finished draft, though it ended with a lot of [and then stuff happened.]

Third attempt, second draft--A pretty substantial restructuring of the above, including a partially wrong-headed rethinking of the romance storyline, and an actual ending.

Third attempt, third draft--A pretty substantial restructuring of the above, including a rethinking of the romance storyline, and hopefully a better ending.

Third time's a charm.

(I have decided to refer to this draft as Feisty Fawn, following the naming conventions of Ubuntu releases, because I was so tired of angsting over the amount of time and work I have spent so far. And fawns are adorable.)

Comments

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

Wow. *Wow*. I had no idea your drafts/versions were so radically different. And on a deadline, too. Yikes.

At least you can see what the flaws of each draft were. I'm not very good at doing that. I just end up doing things that I like better and that I know make it stronger, but I can't explain why. (Yes, I edit using the Force, why do you ask?)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

It was a very generous deadline, to begin with!

It IS difficult doing so much restructuring and replotting. There are other times I've felt like I had a little padding, where I could polish the prose or strengthen an emotional arc but I would have felt comfortable turning in an earlier draft if I ran out of time. With this one, even the most recent draft I finished was not at all one I would have felt OK about turning in.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Well, I have never written a novel to contract and to deadline before. And I have never written a novel between the gaps of doing editorial revisions and copy-edits and having my finger broken. So I think it's only to be expected that there's a learning curve there.

I for one am fiercely proud of my fearlessness in recognizing what isn't working and throwing it out and starting over. One of the things that I've come to realize is that if you do two rounds of editorial revisions on a book, and another round of line edits, and another round of copy edits, and then checking each successive pass to make sure that it's okay, you had better adore what you're writing and be prepared to stand behind it 100%. (...And simultaneously ready to accept criticism. Hah.) So this is what I've gotta do and I don't regret it one bit.