The books are here, the bookmarks are here, the door prizes for the launch party are almost ready, and it’s official: Stone Alliance is in its finished form, no more to be hacked apart and reassembled.
And just like that, I’m jumping from my beautifully polished, finished project to some really rough early drafts.
It’s hard.
The characters refuse to settle into their roles and personalities, I’m falling into gaping plot holes every two steps, and oh, the clichés!
This is the point where my writerly ego takes a severe battering. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again, I’ll keep pushing through it. But I think one of the hardest parts of being a writer is that the first draft never seems to get better, no matter how many first drafts you’ve written.
What’s the hardest part of the writing process for you?
BumblesBooks 
How about the fact that I’m on the bazillionth rewrite of my first book?!?!?! GAH!!
Sometimes writing is kind of like repeatedly banging your head on a brick wall, isn’t it? 😛 But you’re doing an amazing job with your rewrite! Just keep writing!
It really is. And I am. You’d be proud. 8,000 words today either newly written or incorporated and blended from precious drafts. I’m hoping to get another few thousand done before the day is out. I want to be done with the rewrite by Easter.
You are amazing! Keep up the pace! I’ve been crawling along at like 300 words a day, but that’s still progress, right?
Absolutely!!! And it’s not like you have anything else going on in your life right now… 😉
I don’t find the first draft too daunting; I’ve convinced myself, after a decade of NaNoWriMos, that it will be craptastic, and I’ll fix it later. What I struggle with is after the first half-dozen revisions, I discover all the rookie mistakes I missed 6 times already. And I need to change the opening pages. And I’m pretty sure I should change the name of that supporting character. And I swore that dress was red (dammit, where’d I write that). And I love that scene, but okay, I have to cut it.
All after going through it 6 times. Sigh. And that’s before the beta readers mark it up 🙂
Agh, yes, those revisions can be disheartening sometimes. I have a bad habit of changing something in one scene that causes continuity issues EVERYWHERE ELSE, and then it takes me like three drafts before I finally catch most of them!
The hardest part for me seems to be once that first draft is written. I was never a self-editor in high school or college. I wrote a paper and trusted my first instincts, turned it in without reading it over, and got an A. Turns out that method doesn’t quite work for novels. I’ll write the first drafts and then you fix them. 😉
Yes! I was the same way. I still have a really hard time facing that first rewrite, because I don’t know where to start. That’s why I love my beta readers! 🙂