Third Draft Blues

Wednesday on my Facebook Page, I shared a brilliant blog post by Chuck Wendig, where he discussed how the second draft doesn’t get the attention it deserves. And more importantly, what you need to now about the second draft of your novel. It was exactly the post I needed to read.

I had just finished reading over the second draft of my novel and I found myself with a conundrum on my hands, there was still quite a bit of work that needed to be done before I could officially begin editing, and it would require a cut of almost 35,000 words of the novel. I had previously already wreaked my way through the latter half of the novel, only to find the first half of the novel requiring a bit of care in it’s wake. I was distraught, and frustrated, how was it possible that I was approaching the third draft and I was still in need of a cut like this? Then, Chuck’s words of wisdom came to my rescue:

Sometimes you have to write the wrong thing to figure out how to write the right thing.

This is a sentiment that anyone who is not a writer would likely not understand. To the non-writer and even some new authors, this sentence seems almost counterintuitive, and yet as writers we know. Writing is, a strange and meticulous process. It requires a great deal more work than just the first draft or even first couple of drafts can hope to deliver. I knew going into my edits that there were going to be things I wanted to change, things that needed to be changed for the sake of the story. But until the words are actually out, you have no idea how much exactly is going to need to changed. At first glance, the change seemed almost superficial in the sense that it didn’t seem like something that would take up that much word count. It was a slight change of scenery, or so I thought. But that slight change of scenery ended up having vast and far reaching implications. Implications which I suspect may not be fully clear until well into the actual editing process of draft 3.

For now however, I will be hard at work attempting to makeup the lost word count, before my November 1st deadline.