Friday Writing Update

All my writing time this week has been spent on editing and self-critiquing the second draft of my first novel, and I have come to two distinct realisations. First, I've been spending a lot of time just reading it and figuring out what worked and what didn't when what I really wanted to do from the start was reduce it to an outline and rewrite it. There's some good stuff in there, but also some glaring holes, dead-end plots and out-of-nowhere revelations that need foreshadowing. I don't need to re-read the whole thing twice to get a handle on that.

The second revelation is that, even during the writing of that book, I got better at it. The very beginning is disjointed, and I remember writing it in first-person, present-tense, then running out of steam very quickly. I switched to third-person, past-tense, with many points of view, and I still think that's not ideal, but by halfway I had clearly found a kind of rhythm. I was also trying to build to a climax, but clearly had no idea how to get there.

So, in short, I might have been wasting my time over the past few weeks, which kinda sucks, but this second draft thing is as new to me now as writing a first draft was at the time. You've got to start somewhere, right? Tomorrow, I'm going back to the beginning and doing this for real, outlining properly, editing and tweaking that, then fleshing it out again into a proper second draft.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I was going to try another Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge, too, but I couldn't make anything of my randomly-selected TV show style mash-up.
PPS - I got "Arrested Development" and "The Walking Dead". I only watch one of those.