Another thread prompted this question, a member has just finished their first draft and feels like they could skip around the garden with excitement. So, my question is, when you finished your first draft, what did you do? For the first draft of my true life, I honestly can't remember, I think I gave a huge sigh but when I finished the first draft of my fiction, I sat and cried!
I literally called all my family members and told them. But no one answered. So Leaka celebrated by himself on WF. Hehee.
The first day was lots of jumping around and dancing and singing, congratulating myself. The second day was boredom. The third day I just had to go and re-read, to see where five months of my life had disappeared to.
i don't think i did anything but print it out, so i could give it a 'cold' read as a reader, before starting the tedious editing process...
We did nothing special. @KaTrian and I were a little saddened that the project was over (I know, we were so naïve back then). Originally we had planned to try writing together as a one-off experiment, no plans of publishing, no nothing. Then, when we went to bed that night, we started talking about how much fun it was, how much it sucked that it was over, and eventually realized we didn't have to stop. Now, six years and 16 novel-length 1st drafts later, we're still writing, still enjoying the hell out of it, learning to suck less every day, and we'll probably keep on going (regardless of whether we ever get published or not) until it's time to join the choir invisible.
I was visiting my mother on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia when I wrote the final pages of my first draft. All I did was go downstairs and tell her I was finished. Then, if I remember right, I had a glass of whiskey and went to bed.
When I finished the first draft of my current project, I posted about it in The Happiness Thread. Then I started planning the editing phase, which I am doing now, and lined up some beta-readers.
I was about 15 or 16 ( I'm awful with dates.) My project was massive and filled like three or four - three inch binders. I hauled them downstairs to show my family. Unfortunately, they seemed to think that was it I was done. I knew better, it was just the beginning. So far I've never managed to whip that beast into shape - one day though.
I was mildly exhilarated Then I tried to leave it alone to sort of marinate before the editing was to start. Yeah, good luck with that! I think I made it two hours before beginning reading. That's when I got the shock of my life. "Who made all these spelling and punctuation errors?!?!"
@KaTrian and I are convinced there's a poltergeist living in our home that opens our WIP files at night, messes up the typing, writes in plot holes, inconsistencies, and general idiocy 'cause every morning when we wake up and start proof-reading/editing, we find all these glaring mistakes that we could swear weren't there last night when we wrote it!
That is a reasonable hypothesis. Clearly *we* could not have done this! I remember writing that scene and it was awesome. This scene, however, needs a lot of help. Maybe whoever wrote this should give this new "He" character a name. That'd go really well.
Y'know, you could write an entertaining story about that. A ghost opens up your story and messes with it, and you must find out why.
Not a bad idea. The funny thing is, our things often move about (and then reappear in their usual places a few days later), disappear altogether, or even break. No joke either; something like 4-5 times a plate/glass/cup has fallen out of a neatly filled/stacked cupboard at night and broken on the floor whereas something has gone "bump" in the other rooms about a dozen times. Since we're definitely not at fault () when it comes to the moving/disappearing things, and it's fun to come up with characters, we decided all that's caused by two spectres. One of them is a ghost, and he's the nicer one of the two and usually just moves things, makes a mess of our apartment, but tends to return things to us later on, whereas the other one is an actual poltergeist: she's the one who breaks the dishes, steals things (when they mysteriously disappear never to be seen again), and makes noises in other rooms at night. Nope, no other explanation is possible. It must be ghosts.
@Link the Writer, it sure seems that way. Oh well, at least it inspires story ideas when weird stuff happens. Now if only we could convince them to clean up after themselves...
I want a ghost with OCD. I'd wake up every morning to a nice, clean, dusted house with all the dishes put away. I'd be really nice to that ghost.
I went right to the beginning and started editing. Basically once I'm done regurgitating all my ideas into the story, I go to the beginning and then start the heavy duty editing. I don't edit until I'm done writing the first draft because I want to get all the ideas out when they're fresh in my head. Once it's all on paper I can start elaborating more and making things more complicated. But before that, I have to make sure the meat of it is there. Even if it changes moderately, the foundation of the story is there. So once the foundation is there, I just build and build until I have a beautiful mansion
I think I told a buddy of mine and mentioned it to my wife, but I knew that it was only a step along the way--an important one, but still nowhere near the finish.
I didn't really have anyone who would care that I wrote a first draft of a novel. The first time I finished a first draft, I just tucked it away for a while and started on the first draft of the sequel.
