Yes, I WON!!!
Don't get your panties too much in a wad with excitement for me, though. I'm still writing on the manuscript, yes, and I'm now a little over 52,000 words, so I haven't completely given up on it yet, or anything...
But I wince thinking about it. It's pretty much crap. It's melodramatic, too formal in its dialogue, and, oh my GOD, I think the protagonists save each other about a dozen times! Sheesh! No one could possibly be in this much danger!
Still, I have to just wallow in the mud a bit... get it oozing between my toes, smell it, even feel the grit of it on my tongue. (Yes, I know how gross that sounds.) But it should get better. I love revising, even if I wish it weren't that utterly necessary (though it is, in my case). I am not, and never will be, the writer who puts a brilliant first draft down on paper.
Nope, I'm the dork wad who writes something a seventh grader would gag over--something no sane person would call good writing--and then I revise the hell out of it until it shines like a brand new Cadillac.
I just make sure I don't show any of the muddy version(s) to anyone, even friends. I want to keep my friends, after all.
How 'bout you? Are you brilliant first, or does it only come with a LOT of hard reworking/rewriting/revising?
Or do you know?
I do revise, but I generally have a pretty clean first draft, with the story intact and the characters fleshed out. I can't stand it otherwise. If it's crap, it nigs and nigs at me and I can't move forward.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I don't think that writing a "better" first draft necessarily means a better novel in the end. It's a different path, but many a brilliant individual can't edit worth a damn. I've gone through my drafts a dozen times and I ALWAYS find stuff I missed before. And there's something to be said with being able to turn trash into treasure that some of us more impatient folks (who toss it instead) might very well be missing out on.