What to post here in the wake of the epic Book of Freaks ...
What to post here in the wake of the epic Book of Freaks free-for-all? I don't know. I have been working on 2 books, both of which I have a goal of finishing by the end of summer. These are not first drafts, I should mention. I have been working on these books--both of them combined--for about four or five years. One is a book of nonfiction and the other is a novel. The nonfiction is in its 8th or 9th draft (I lost count and stopped numbering the files) and the novel is probably in its third draft. The latter of these two is more nebulous in that the process of writing it was quite different.
For the nonfiction I composed a complete first draft, and wrote multiple revisions, tried different things, added tons of material, etc. Now, though, I've taken much of the later material and reformulated it so that it works in the original first draft. I know that sounds probably more complicated than it actually is, so I'll just say that I went back to the drawing board.
The novel started as me simply transcribing dreams. I knew I wanted to write the novel, and I had some ideas as to who the characters were, and as such they were floating around in my head for some time. Probably because of that I started having very strange dreams that seemed to feature the very characters I was thinking of. What better way to characterize such people that to transcribe these dreams? That pretty much comprised the "first draft." It was short--maybe 20K words--very note-y and surreal (duh), like dreams. For a while I played around with that material, but then I had to work on other stuff because of deadlines.
Later, I thought a little more coherently about the characters, and a new character came to me, and I knew he needed to be fleshed out, that his story was integral. So I wrote it. I spent about six months and wrote a short novel about that guy. That turned out to be Part I of the current draft, so I consider it Draft 2 of the novel-at-large.
Thus I'd say I'm in the midst of draft 3, since I've been at work making the book into a book. I don't know how many drafts this book will require, but I honestly hope it's not 8 or 9. Fuck that. That's way too much work to put into anything.
For the nonfiction I composed a complete first draft, and wrote multiple revisions, tried different things, added tons of material, etc. Now, though, I've taken much of the later material and reformulated it so that it works in the original first draft. I know that sounds probably more complicated than it actually is, so I'll just say that I went back to the drawing board.
The novel started as me simply transcribing dreams. I knew I wanted to write the novel, and I had some ideas as to who the characters were, and as such they were floating around in my head for some time. Probably because of that I started having very strange dreams that seemed to feature the very characters I was thinking of. What better way to characterize such people that to transcribe these dreams? That pretty much comprised the "first draft." It was short--maybe 20K words--very note-y and surreal (duh), like dreams. For a while I played around with that material, but then I had to work on other stuff because of deadlines.
Later, I thought a little more coherently about the characters, and a new character came to me, and I knew he needed to be fleshed out, that his story was integral. So I wrote it. I spent about six months and wrote a short novel about that guy. That turned out to be Part I of the current draft, so I consider it Draft 2 of the novel-at-large.
Thus I'd say I'm in the midst of draft 3, since I've been at work making the book into a book. I don't know how many drafts this book will require, but I honestly hope it's not 8 or 9. Fuck that. That's way too much work to put into anything.
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