Made in the Edits: Lessons from My First Novel, part 3

Sometimes you actually have to finish something before you really understand the process. My first novel was a great example of this principle.

Some background: I wrote what I thought was a detailed outline and character description before I started on the first draft of Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I finished the first draft, and it just barely reached 50,000 words. And, to be honest, by the time I was working on the last third of the book, I was feeling pretty tired of it and definitely wasn't doing my best at that point. And I wasn't even really crunching to finish it! I just found it hard to maintain interest in writing the same thing for such a long period.

So, what happened? I re-read that first draft and was pretty disappointed. I set it aside and tried writing some other short stories.

I let it sit for a while, wondering whether I should even keep working on it, or scrap it and retry.

Eventually, I decided to start my efforts at editing, and, long story short, I transformed it into something I'm really happy with.

What did I discover as I began editing? First, I found that my outline had very little connective tissue. I found that simply adding more worldbuilding and character interactions drastically improved the quality of the story. It was a long and drawn-out task, looking through the manuscript and trying to add to it in meaningful ways, but in doing so I managed to add another 15,000 words and now the story was in much better shape.

Then, I realized I had made a mistake. I was writing almost entirely in the first-person perspective, but I had one chapter, about the crew of the Heliotrope, that was in the third-person. I realized that I had written character descriptions for that whole crew, but done next to nothing with them. I sat down and brainstormed a series of events that would give the reader perspective about the captive crew, and realized I could easily add a few more chapters! In the end, I added four more chapters and over 10,000 more words. And now, the Heliotrope's crew is not just a MacGuffin, but a group of people with actual characters in the story, not just in my character profiles.

I continued editing. In the end, I went through twelve or thirteen significant revision cycles, and ended up north of 80,000 words in total. Of course, I also perceived that the story was much more interesting, engaging, varied, and detailed. It was practically a whole different novel from that first draft.

It was enlightening to see how much I added in the later drafts. I expected that my outline would "see me through" the process, when actually the level of detail and complexity of the outline was just not high enough. I added a bunch of difficult interactions between characters, incorporated quite a few failures and false leads into the plot, and fleshed out the places they visited much better.

So, what did I learn? First, be aware that quality will probably suffer over extended writing, even when the overall pace is quite slow--the bare fact of writing about the same thing over and over for days can be quite discouraging by itself.

Second, longer works need more attention after the first draft than I expected. Of course, we all know that it's not just finding typos, but at the same time, I'm amazed at how much I changed things and how much I added during the editing process. Almost half the book!

Third, avoid tunnel vision and ossification as you edit. I moved chapters around, re-wrote significant chunks of a few chapters, added new chapters and then doubled the length of each new chapter by coming up with an additional plot element! Nothing is set in stone until the end.

Fourth, recognize that even if you're enjoying writing the first draft, the bare fact is that some days you might not be on your best game. Therefore, you'll need to look at your work carefully and recognize those chunks where maybe you were still interested, but perhaps you had a bit of a headache or indigestion and just weren't at top form.

Finally, I discovered that I could really make the different characters have different voices and unique and colorful expressions, but to do so required me to pay extremely close attention for openings to add these points in the edit. These character and setting bits were probably never going to be in an outline, so they were necessarily the product of editing.

If you'd like to see where Pursuit of the Heliotrope ended up (and I think you should), go check out this free sample.