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I’ve just begun the revision process for my first novel. It’s a little daunting, I’ll admit. 238 pages lay before me, and I’ve no idea what will stay and what will go as I tear through the manuscript. Using an extremely scientific and not-at-all random series of post-it notes and scribbled guidelines, I’ve got a few thoughts on what needs to be changed, what characters need to be beefed up, what plot elements need to be dropped, and where prose needs to be simplified. I’m making slow progress, but I hope to be done with this draft by the end of May.

This is, I believe, the hardest phase of the writing process. I’ve gotten the story out on paper. Now I have to face the cold, hard reality that large swaths of the first draft are simply terrible. I mean terrible. Rationally, I can accept that, because let’s face it: first drafts suck. No first draft in the history of man has ever been any good. But emotionally it’s very difficult to go back and see that what you were so satisfied with the first time around was just godawful. That means discouragement, which you have to overcome to get to the next step in the process. I’m a little past that psychological summit, but I’m still deal with the fact that the first time through, I didn’t really know what I was doing. Now I’ve got to take a whole bunch of discordant plot threads and jumpy character arcs and smooth them out, tie them up, and make it look like I knew what I was doing.

The biggest challenge personally is reordering out character hierarchy. Some characters are clearly just there to support the main ones, and I need to make them stand alone and give them their own stories, their own motivations, and their own arcs. Now that’s not going to be easy, but as a fan of ensemble dramas, I have trouble just leaving characters in a supporting role. I’ll get it worked out eventually, but it’ll take a lot of time and a lot of thought.

After I get through this draft, I’ll be able to focus on making the novel sing, but right now, I’ve just got to buckled down and plow through it and hope that I like what I have when I’m done.

Wait! Let me explain!

By babies, of course, I mean fictional character that I have created and invested in emotionally. And by killing, I mean… well, killing. Yes, I’ve reached the point in my narrative where I have begun to off my main characters. Not all of them, of course. There’s still enough story to tell to justify keeping some of them around (for now… muahaha…). But I have begun to gradually eliminate certain characters in order to advance the plot and the emotional arcs of more important characters.

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I reached a personal milestone today – 200 pages. That’s right, I am now officially 200 pages into The Novel. (Is it appropriate to call it a novel? I feel like that implies some sort of class and prestige, and not at all the general pulp spectacle that I have been crafting, but I digress.) Even better, the finish line is in sight. I’ve got the major plot line to resolve, obviously, with all of the little character bits that are tied into it, and I’ve also got one major dangling plot thread that I need to address and figure out how to weave back into the whole of the narrative. It’s one of those bits that may be cut the second time around. The characters at the center of it were at one point in the planning stages relatively important to the plot, but as it developed, their stories and mine diverged from one another. But! As I said, personal milestone achieved. Now I just need to make that final push, and then, with a first draft in hand, I’ll actually be able to get a little rest. Huzzah!

I’ve reached that stage in the creative process where, on the verge of finishing draft one of the novel, I find myself struggling to force out the final sixty or so pages. I think the problem is twofold: first, I’ve already unintentionally turned my mind toward the first revision. It’s impossible not to think about the changes that I’m going to make when I go through the story again. That makes it significantly more difficult to focus on the draft at hand, especially when I find myself coming up with new ideas that, while appropriate for the late stages of the book given the way certain characters have developed, contradict already-established events that I’ll have to change the second time around. It’s frustrating to not be able to guide the story the way I’d like it to this time around, but that’s what I get for the way I write. I don’t like to lay out the whole story before I write it, because then I’m stuck trying to conform to an outline, and by extension, shutting out potential sources of inspiration and avenues of creativity. On the whole, I prefer my approach, but it is not without its consequences.

Second, independent of any next steps in the process, I’m just ready for this draft to be done. It’s a tremendous intellectual strain to force myself to write every day after work. Some days I hit my word goal, some days I don’t, but I am at least getting a couple of pages done every day, and I’m finally reaching the point of exhaustion. I need to finish this draft just so I have a draft finished, at which point I’ll be able to step away from the process for a couple of weeks before starting again. I’m honestly just ready to be done with the thing for a bit, but in order to do that, I have to finish it, as exhausting as that may be.

But I’m slowly but surely making my way to the finish line, and I hope to have a draft completed by the end of the month. Here’s hoping!

Good Lord, February is almost over. As a winterphile, that is extremely uncool. As a baseball fan, though, I feel unwarranted excitement building inside of me. I mean, I know that the Cubs have about as much chance of winning the World Series this year as Jimmy Carter does of winning a second term in the White House, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll be any less excited to watch them play. I’m actually considering purchasing an MLB.TV subscription so that I can actually watch the games, but I think that I’ll probably end up just making due with the MLB At Bat iPhone app that got me through last summer. Besides, if I have to choose between listening to Len & Bob and Pat & Ron, I’ll choose the latter every time.

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