Tag: second-draft blues

Stick A Fork In Me

By

On October 12, 2012

In My Failings As A Proper Novelist, Writer's Low

Oh my GOD so many things about this book are driving me around the bend right now. Everything is wrong. My first chapter which I thought two days ago was much improved is awful again. My hook isn’t hooky at all. It’s a sharp pin that pokes and stabs and says “don’t read me! don’t read me!” Some of my characters are shockingly one-dimensional and way underdeveloped. The song lyrics I struggled all day to write today are at best amateurish. And the formatting! The formatting is all wrong.

Revising it into what I want it to be is like trying to stuff a live octopus into a lunchbox.

Last week we were such good friends. I loved you. What happened? Where did we go wrong?

I’m ready to walk away.

And Away We Go

By

On October 6, 2012

In Organizing, Revision

I think a week’s long enough to wait before starting editing, don’t you?

I’m curious to know how people work with their document to edit it. Organization isn’t my strong point. I have a single Open Office document with my entire first draft written in it. Obviously I’m not going to edit directly onto that. I’m thinking about copying it in one- or two-chapter chunks into new documents and revising from there. Or maybe this is a good time to get Scrivener, since it chunks up your work for you? Maybe use the smaller two-chapter docs to edit and then paste those into a new, complete second-draft doc so I can see it all together?

The first two chapters present an additional dilemma because I’m planning on deleting 90% of them and starting from scratch. Maybe I’ll paste them into a new doc, and then start writing fresh below, pasting in the bits that I want to keep as I go. I’m starting to wish I had two monitors so I don’t have to keep going back and forth between the new and old versions all the time…

***EDIT***

Almost forgot I bought that highly recommended book on editing. Maybe I should read it and it will give me some tips. I’m really awesome sometimes.

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