Ah, the second draft. A milestone in the writing process, a stepping stone to becoming published, and sometimes the equivalent of a sharp rock in a person's shoe. Somewhere out there in the big world, there must be someone who can whip up the second draft of their manuscript with ease. But for the rest of we mortals, it's usually not so easy, right?
It takes longer (or seems to), because we're rewriting parts and even whole chapters of a story we already know back and forth. It's not like re-reading a story; we're taking each scene apart and trying to figure out how to phrase it best. And since we know what stage of the story we're actually writing, we can easily be aware of just how many more major story events we have to work through before reaching the end.
And in the second draft, we really have to focus on fixing the small problems. Back in the Draft Number One, we could just throw these over our shoulders trilling "the edits are later!" and write what we want to push the plot forward. But now (unless you save those kind of edits for a later draft, of course), we have to start dealing with the little consistency issues and grammar problems. Now we have to slow down from world-building and make sure John Doe doesn't have blue eyes in Chapter One and green eyes in the epilogue.
And then there's the word count! Ulgh, when there's over 100, 000 words! We want to keep all the good stuff we've spent time thinking up, right? But of course, 100,000 plus words is a little hard to swallow, so into the "Extra Scenes" file it goes. And then there are the times when the manuscripts are too short; that's not too fun either. Because we want everything to be quality material--no plot clutter, and no scenes that seem to pop out of nowhere--and that can take quite a bit of time to come up with.
But even with the tricky parts of writing a second draft, there are still a lot of great things about them! They're a stage in the creative process that's full of possibilities, for one. It's the part where we mold with the material of the first draft; organizing the plot structure to the way it needs to be, shaping the characters' personalities, and building up the settings more. We get to develop and focus on more aspects of the story than we probably could have while getting the main plot down in the first draft.
Plus, now that we're well into the second draft of the story, we probably know the characters a lot better. Having worked with them for hours and seeing where their actions take them in the plot, it's most likely gotten easier to know how they think, what they believe, what they would do, and all the other awesome things that make up a character. They aren't as much of a mystery as they might have been during the first draft.
And on top of all those things, the very fact that we've gotten so far in writing the story means something good. Because finishing one whole draft and choosing to soldier through another is probably a pretty good sign that this story is something special. It shows that it's worth investing more time and focus on; that it isn't just a slightly interesting tale that we'd like to try out, but that it's a really good story that's worth sharing with the rest of the world.
So: second drafts. What do you think of them? Do you kind of get hung up on them sometimes? Or do the less-than-awesome portions seem small in comparison to all the other awesome stuff?
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