Same here. Except for a few sentences and maybe a full paragraph here and there, my second revision has absolutely nothing in common with drat one. My first draft now looks like a coloring book outline yet to be filled in.
I always viewed the first draft process very similar to shoveling mud onto a table. It's rather disgusting, grueling work and you end up with rocks and bits of trash and maybe even some old dog poop. It's just the first step to making a beautiful statue or vase or something though. You can't make something good if you don't start with the base materials. You keep going because you don't want to be left with just a pile of mud.
I'm just not made to start over after finishing my first draft. It has to be my only draft, with nothing but polishing to do. And I've never been able to get my head around the "totally different story" aspect of revising - my brain says why not write the final story the first time around? But that's just the way I'm wired. Whatever gets the story finished is the right way to do it.
I agree with this to a point, though I'm not one to carve away at a single chapter until it's done, either. I guess I'm more in the middle--I write a complete first draft, making my best attempt upfront but still knowing that I'm going to go back and clean up. I actually look forward to it. But the current drafts of each of my projects (I don't think any have reached "final" status yet, though) are still pretty true to their first drafts. I find the majority of my revisions are in the writing itself, rather than content. Just further proof that everyone is different. The only way you'll know what works best is to get working! Oh, and I echo @jannert in the congratulations! Getting to the end is never easy, but it's an incredibly rewarding experience. Keep on pluggin' away.
Yes you are. Your first draft is supposed to be total crap. You re-read it and sigh and roll up your sleeves and get to work. That is where the magic happens. All those pages that you don't like? Fix them. All that dialogue that was not very clever? Fix it. And maybe learn to "let it go" as you write. Just write. Edit later. I edit emails, for God's sake. Edit and edit! Frequently, after I send them I look back and think "CRAP! I totally missed a great joke!" and I feel like an idiot.
Hemingway? I'm letting you know not to be discouraged by the fact that yours is largely awful too All of ours are, as well. We all re-read them and manage to suppress our gag reflex and think "I must never show this to anyone. It would be a serious disservice to good people were I to force them to read this... muck." Then you go back and change some of the most egregiously bad parts that sort of whisper that they should sound more like [fill in the blank] and suddenly it starts to sound.... less awful. By the 7th or 8th re-read and re-edit, you begin to feel that it has actual potential! You start to feel excited. Some parts begin to feel as if they might just be brilliant! Those parts? They make you keep going. The first time you stop writing and call it done; all you've really done is finished the original application of words to the page. After that you must spend the real work of making it into a "work". Don't give up. Keep going. When you are ready, publish. I wrote a 500 page book in 14 days. All it was was a framework for me to go back and start bending and shaving and polishing, painting and smoothing. That took months. Months! Before it was ready.
But don't make the mistake of assuming everyone works that way. Many do, but not all. I could never write a 500 page book in 14 days. The best I've ever done is a 91K novel (first draft) in about 4 months, and that was really speedy. But I definitely didn't read it back and suppress my gag reflex. While I don't necessarily edit as I go, I also don't just dump heaps of garbage all over the page. I take it slow and try to weed through the garbage before it even makes it to the page. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. It's totally fine that speeding through a first draft and then heavily editing works for you. I'm not as far down that end of the scale. That works for me. And @shadowwalker 's way works for her. But I can say for sure that there's no way your way would work for me. I know myself too well. But that's cool. As long as we get sh*t done, who cares how we get there? To each her or his own, as it goes.
On another note, it's amazing how much a draft can expand on the revision. My first chapter was 857 words when I posted it to the workshop, and now it's sitting at 1,546 about three-quarters of the way through the re-write.
Agreed It was difficult for me to let go and just write, at first. Very difficult. My instinct is that you could take something really bad and turn it into something great, in the editing phase. I use the first draft like an artist uses their sketch pad. Rough it out and get it in the vicinity of goodness After that you start your real work. You'd have a hard time chiseling and shaping and polishing one inch at a time, on a statue the size of David. But if you kept shaving, chiseling, shaping and roughing it out until you could see it all, then you could start taking the finer tools and sandpaper to it. Maybe a better example would be OPs first try at the novel. Trying to make it perfect and in no need of editing, after the first run through.... did it work? The first draft is not throwing down garbage. It is writing your thoughts as they come. Typically, for me anyway, editing involves changing how things were worded and fortunately adding lots more words. Each edit adds an average of 3% to the book. In the last two years I have become much more at ease with deleting whole sections that just don't work or don't add to the story. I once cut six straight pages that just didn't do anything for me. It hurt, but that's editing. That one snip helped me to stop worrying about losing work and get accustomed to the feeling that I wanted the *final* work to be great. Not the intermediary steps.
^ I've gone right back to the beginning for 2014. Don't get me wrong, I'm keeping the work, just retyping it and editing as I go, since I find that I edit better if I'm actually typing out and constructing a new section from "scratch", or a basic "draft"
Thank you everyone for your wonderful and insightful replies! Good luck in 2014. I hope we are all able to meet our goals. I will keep plugging away at my first draft... Already have many ideas for round two.
Hemingway is not God, y'know. He's another writer who made a statement about how he wrote (and there are some who dispute that as well). I'm never discouraged by my first draft being awful because by the time I've finished the first draft, it's ready for polishing (and has been gone over very thoroughly by my betas, who are both published authors). If a sentence is awful when I write it, I redo it so it's not. Then I move on.
Or size 1 million writing Actually, on second thoughts, you could probably write a 500 page book with that size of writing in under 14 seconds, let alone days
The way I and many other writers that I know write is what we call 'creative vomit'. If we get a great idea, we just write it out straight away, no matter how unorganised or bad it is. After this, we go back and kind of re-write it, so that we still have this great creative idea, but we've refined it and cleaned it up. There's nothing wrong with a bad first draft. They can actually be seen as good because they give you an opportunity to add things in when you rewrite and shape up the initial 'creative vomit'!
As someone who owned a manuscript critiquing service I can tell you from experience that it's not the case. Over 95% of what was submitted was written by nice, sincere, dedicated people who had no clue that a scene on the page is unlike one for film or stage. They thought POV referred to which personal pronouns were being used. They had never heard of scene and sequel, motivation/response units, scene goals, or anything they didn't learn in high school English class. It wasn't a matter of improving the story. What I saw wasn't the first draft, it was what they thought of as the finished product ready for submission, and it was terrible. They could try to improve it forever, but because the problem was one of missing knowledge, not talent and skill, they would never have seen the problems had they not paid for a real critique. So the solution wasn't to work harder, or to read novels hoping that by viewing the finished product they might intuit the process. It was a matter of picking up the learned skills and knowledge of the profession so they could create the work knowledgeably. Sloppy it might be, and riddled with "Oh my god what was I thinking," just like everyone's first draft. But when a pro does a first draft the scene elements are where they should be. Tension enters as it must and is managed to keep the reader turning pages. It needs polishing. Foreshadowing needs to be placed, and sparkle added to the dialog. But gotchas that cause most manuscripts to be rejected before the end of page one are missing. And that takes knowledge of the structure of writing fiction for the printed word. How could they rewrite dialogue meaningfully when they were missing the basics of character creation and POV? How? They made those mistakes because they lacked basic knowledge of story structure for the medium. Sure, after they're away from their story for long enough that they view it more like a reader than the writer they can see that the "first draft is horrible." As a reader they recognize that, but without the knowledge of why it has that problem they cannot fix it. Sol Stein was dead on when he said, “Readers don’t notice point-of-view errors. They simply sense that the writing is bad.” My favorite quote, by Mark Twain, pretty well sums up the problems most hopeful writers face: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
