Fear of Revisions

I am a god of my own microcosm and I am afraid.

I have created a world. A lopsided, broken world the orbits drunkenly around its creator...Me...

Yes, I have written a first draft.

It's perfect in it's dysfunction.

And I am terrified.

I am terrified because now I have to take this broken ball of words and tear it apart, character by character, word by word, sentence by sentence, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, and rebuild it. Make it whole again. Make it less broken, more stable in its orbit. Make the words more meaningful, the tension more palpable, the characters more real. Take all the broken pieces and make them whole. Take this barren world and make it alive.

I am its god. The creator of its existence. It's terrifying.

I woke up at 4:45 this morning because today I'm planning on starting the revisions. Marking up the beautifully printing, pristine manuscript with hasty scrawls of fear driven madness. I woke up with words crashing in my head. Loud, screaming words. I let the draft sit for several days. My MC, Julius, says it's time.

I will do it because I am its creator. I am it's god, but I am also its slave. Somewhere along the line it BECAME. It isn't a figment of my imagination anymore. I breathed life into it and it lives, breathes, loves, hates, FEELS.

Now I must tame it, make it whole. Give it a soul.

It terrifies me when I think of it.

Despite the terror deep in my heart, I know I can do this. I took it from nothing and created it.

Today, I start crafting its soul so that one day it might touch others and live inside them. A memory, a history, changing them the way it has changed me. This isn't self-aggrandizing. It is the nature of stories.

One day this story will be whole and it starts today.

I am a god of my own microcosm and I am terrified/certain/confidence/fearful/excited.

My will be done.

'Till Next Time

First Draft Lessons

/pimp
Keep an eye out on my blog for the cover reveal of Uprising (Children of the Gods #2) on Wednesday August 22nd. It's awesome!
/end pimp

We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog post already in progress.

Ok, I need to get this out of my head so I can continue writing my current WIP. I've learned a lot writing my the first draft of Stone of Unity. Not surprising considering the act of writing is practice for future writing. 

Very zen and circular, I know. Deal with it.

Anyway, I wanted to impart some of the things I have learned about the process and the story as it unfolded through the first draft. For those of you crazy enough to follow me on twitter, you may have seen me talking about possibly rewriting the entire thing. For those of you who have finished your novel, you may know what I'm talking about.

Some of my betas are freaking right now, and I can assure them, that Stone of Unity may change significantly, but the characters you have come to know and love will still be in there. The plot should stay mostly the same, but I have decided to shift the focus a little (or a lot depending on how you look at it).

Here is what happened. Partway through the first draft, one of my side characters decided that she was one of the main characters. This caused some shifting, but I was jumping POV from chapter to chapter, so it wasn't a huge deal. Then I considered moving chapter 2 to chapter 1 and vice versa. Ultimately, this didn't do much, but it did cause my brain to start really altering the story mid-way through.

This started more thinking.

Then I decided to post said new Chapter 1 on the WriteOnCon forum/online conference. It was fascinating and I got some feedback. This is the feedback I got that really got the ball rolling in my head.

The idea that there's a grumbling mentor figure who will undoubtedly become lovable in our eyes, and a smart young girl about to embark on a journey with this man.

Then I started thinking...and thinking...and thinking...and I realized that my focus was completely wrong on this story. I needed to narrow my focus a bit and write the story that people wanted to see. So, I have my chainsaw ready to hack my story to bits. Hopefully the sound of the engine will drown out the screams of my betas.

But none of this will happen until I get done with the first draft of my current WIP...which is much better focused and has a lot more intensity.

So the lesson?

Oh yeah, I did promise that...

1. In the first draft, nothing is sacred
2. Sometimes secondary characters are more interesting than primary characters. Don't hesitate to swap them.
3. Don't feel bad if you need to hack off chunks of your novel. This doesn't mean you are a failure, it just means that it isn't working. I've seen several authors on Twitter talk about chopping 20K or more from a story because it wasn't working. Their stories will be better for it (even if they lose a little more of their sanity in the process).
4. Do not delete any of your work. Start a new project file/folder and start from there. You never know when you'll want to refer back to it.

'Till next time.

P.S. September sign-ups for #writemotivation are going on right now. Click here to sign up. It's awesome and very helpful.