26 June 2017

The Ghost of the First Draft

Do you ever find yourself making notes on a draft for editing, and find something so stupid that you have to yell at yourself in the margin? Well, I have. Probably more than once. How else can you get through to yourself, really, to stop making dumb mistakes? Mistakes that you should have stopped making a million drafts ago? 

It was Chapter 9, the chapter after my characters have had their first kiss, and so there was a paragraph that talked about kissing, which was fine (except I had used the word kissing like ten times, but that's another issue). But then I came across a really stupid sentence:

I knew I had always been more attracted to guys, I just didn’t realize that meant every single thing was going to be better.

I had to double take. And then yell at myself (and Jordan, too). No, not more attracted. ONLY. Only only only. Wasn't that the entire freaking point??? Helllooooooo? So I took my scary red pen and wrote this in the margin, just to make sure I got my own point across:


HE'S NOT BI.

Ok, so short story Jordan was hooking up with a girl at the end (that was really stupid and well over 6 years ago, don't judge me). First draft Jordan? Eh, well, I dunno, it was foggier. First drafts suck. There were a lot of stupid lines like this floating around. But now? Now????? Noooooooooo. How am I still making these mistakes? How are these tiny details slipping by?

I'm haunted by my first draft.

You think your first draft is gone by the time you're writing the third one? Think again! It creeps around, hiding in lines where you wouldn't think to look. In the dusty corners of undeveloped subplots. You think everything is going so well and your story makes so much sense. Then the ghost reaches out its ghoulish hand and grabs your ankle, tripping you up. Making everything feel off and confusing.

How many lines make it through repeated drafts completely intact? For me, not a lot. If there are any, they're probably dialogue. Even if what happens in a scene stays exactly the same, the words are always changing. Improving, I hope. But just when I think a chapter is safe and perfect I feel like I have to hire some paranormal investigators to exorcise these haunted lines.

So sometimes editing requires hi-tech ghost hunting equipment, scanning over every paragraph for a trace of first draft activity. Sometimes you need to have your holy water ready to flick on a stupid, stupid line. And hopefully with enough work, the first draft can stay buried.

Have you ever been haunted by your first draft? 

12 comments:

  1. The first novel I wrote (and only one I completed) I made so many mistakes. I love revising and editing best now because I had to do so much of it. No matter how many times you look at your first, second, third, etc draft, you'll always find mistakes or better ways to write something. Don't be too hard on yourself.

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  2. At least you found it. Don't panic, you'll find all of them. We all make those dumb mistakes.

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  3. I'm always finding stuff like that. Which is why I dread changing something major once I have the first draft done.

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  4. I've had about a million drafts for my current WIP over the years and I just now figured out there were some unanswered questions about one character. I felt like slapping myself. lol

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  5. I've been there too. It seems to be a never ending process :-)

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  6. No matter how many times I go through my drafts, I'll still keep running into this kind of stuff. Usually because I made an earlier edit that screwed some other part of the sentence.

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  7. Well, I did make a very tiny mistake in this last first draft. Nothing big mind you if you can believe a character winds dead before the scene when he's shot. Yes, that can happen when the writer's mind is slogging through draft #1. :-)

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  8. Sometimes those things are subtle and sometimes they're so obvious we wonder if someone else added words when we weren't looking, because SURELY we would never have been that dumb. The important thing is that they get caught, right?

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  9. Oh yes, these lines and words are very sneaky. I think yes, I've combed through it, and then I look again. Again. And still, yet again, only to find something else glaring incorrectly at me. :)

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  10. I get little things sneaking into my current work all the time. At least I wrote my latest draft from scratch, since I changed something in the first book which completely derailed the second one. Now I just have to deal with third draft mistakes!

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  11. It's painful, but sometimes the only way I can find those kind of things in my writing is to read it out loud. Then, I find all the awkwardly worded sentences (seems like every single one).

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  12. I think most of my sentences from the first draft end up rewritten and different. What always gets me is the little typos that hide and don't get notice until afterwards.

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