What writing the first draft feels like.
No, I don’t write cowboy romance, though I do enjoy reading them. What I’ve been wrestling with is a spicy contemporary romance that refused to be tamed. The story bucked and kicked and bolted at breakneck speed until it finally exhausted its energy. At last, I can climb off, pat its velvety muzzle, and declare a truce. On Monday, I finally typed “The End.”
Please forgive the horsey metaphor. This story has been a fun, challenging ride, quite different from previous manuscripts. Even though I knew where my hero and heroine would end up and roughly how they’d get there, surprises kept popping up. Back I’d go to my outline, pulling weeds and trimming branches. The finished manuscript is big and bushy, badly in need of pruning. The good news: I like that part.
What editing the first draft feels like.
As a hybrid plotter/pantser, I’ve tried various methods to wrangle a story. This time, I used Lisa Cron’s Scene Cards again, as well as tacking brief descriptions of planned scenes onto a corkboard. It was fun to move those around and discard them when written, or when I decided a scene no longer fit.
I guess I’ll always be a slower writer than those who can plot out the whole story and then stick to their plan. I started this story in January—eight months of mostly drafting. That feels like a long time, though I did pause to work on edits for the first book in this series, Through the Red Door, coming soon from The Wild Rose Press.
What was extra-frustrating was my inability to just get to the point. My muse kept poking me, adding scenes: “But, what about…? And what about…?” Finally, I surrendered to the process and just wrote long. Damned long. 106,000 words long. Gotta trim that sucker down to no more than 90K words.
I’m going to try something new: writing a detailed synopsis AFTER finishing the first draft. I hope this will give me a clearer bird’s-eye view of the whole, so I can see which scenes can be trimmed or cut. Wish me luck with my pruning.
How about you? Are you troubled by over-long first drafts? Do you have any tips on trimming?
