On Redrafting

My current WIP is a bit unusual for me, because I’ve already written it once.

I’ve been meaning to edit this book for a while, but hadn’t gotten round to it for a multitude of reasons (not least the fact that I had other books to write). So it’s been sitting on my hard drive waiting for… *checks file date* 4 years. Wow. That’s longer than I thought.

I should say now: I’m not going to tell you what this book is about. It is (at least in my opinion) one of the best story ideas I’ve ever had, and I thought the first draft was, overall, bloody good. But I’m saving it. I would like, in theory, to send this one out to agents and try and get it published traditionally. So I probably won’t be self-publishing it – which means, alas, that I can’t tell you much about it, just in case. It is dystopian, and I would probably call it sci-fi over fantasy, but that might purely be because of the tech level and not the actual themes. That’s all I’m saying.

But said first draft is definitely not ready for agents. It’s got plenty of flaws that developed along the way – many of which were entirely predictable, given my usual approach to planning and outlining. Namely, that I don’t really do it at all and just throw myself into the process with no idea of what’s actually going to happen. (In partial fairness to me, I think I did write an outline for this book at some point, but I suspect that I didn’t do that until I was about 50,000 words in, and only vaguely paid attention to it.

Said approach has some advantages: it leaves plenty of room for flights of inspiration, which can often lead to some truly spectacular set-pieces as I think ‘But what if this…’, and then write it down before my rational brain can stop myself. The problem is that I inevitably think of great plot points that really needed to be introduced at the beginning two-thirds of the way through. For previous books – i.e. Nightingale’s Sword – I went back through with a fine-tooth comb, cutting excess bits and adding in suitable foreshadowing to make everything seem a bit smoother. But this book is… longer. A lot longer. Like, ‘I should probably pitch it as a trilogy’ longer.

So rather than spending months going through and editing, I’ve just started again. This way I can get the world looking the way it should right from the start, instead of faffing around trying to warp everything to a new design. I know the plot already, I know the characters, and I know the handful of new things I need to have them do. I just have to get it all flowing in some slightly different directions. I’ve done this once before, with my very first ‘novel’ – the first time through, it was about 50,000 words long. By the time I finished the second go, it was about 200k. (One day, I’ll go back and finish the sequel. Those poor lads have been sitting on their cliffhanger for far too long.)

I also have the advantage of 4 years’ more experience. There are some scenes from the first draft that I might well lift out wholesale, or with minor tweaks, but for the most part I’d like to think I’m a better writer than I was 4 years ago.

But revisiting the story I told back then is… nice. It’s all just how I left it. I might be rewriting it from the ground up, but fundamentally I was very proud of the concept and the characters, and bringing them to life again is really fun so far. (And I’ve only actually introduced 3 of them, and their best moments are very much yet to come.)

So stay tuned, though any news of this story will be a long time coming. But you’ll definitely see it some day, in some form. It’s too good to sit on forever. At least I think so. I just have to get it to a stage where other people think the same.