FAQ

Well, I've finally received the same question often enough to warrant a frequently asked questions page. Starting with just the one, but please use the contact form to ask any other questions you'd like to have answered (or put them in the comments section)!

1. Q: How different is the final draft compared to the first draft?

    A: I get this question a lot,  pretty much any time I get to talking to someone about being a writer. In an odd form of irony, I am often surprised by how surprised most people are by the answer. The only people who don't seem surprised are other novelists, not just other writers, but specifically novelists. I think the revision process for long form fiction is a whole separate ballgame to most other writing.

Of course, the details depend on the manuscript, but since I've most recently worked on revising Blade's Edge, let's use Blade's Edge as the example.

The first draft of Blade's Edge was over 130,000 words long. The second draft of Blade's Edge (the one published on Jukepop Serials at the moment) is just over 99,000 words. So, to start with there were 31,000 words in the first draft that didn't make it to the second.

On top of that I replaced more than 50% of the of the 99,000 words for draft two. In other words, fewer than 49,500 words from draft one actually remain in draft two.

I completely changed part three. Not a single word from the original part three is the same as it was in the original. This included removing an entire character, and rewriting the entire finishing arc. Some of the scenes remained "the same" but I rewrote every word in them from scratch. Any similarities they bear to their original form are merely coincidence.

I also added two new characters to part three (one of whom had to appear at the tail end of part two) and a whole plot line involving them.

And all of that is just for the second draft. For the third draft, two characters will be removed/rolled into a third character who already exists. No major plot lines are likely to change, but the world building is going to be expanded upon and part one is going to be axed completely/redistributed sparingly throughout the rest of the text. We're going to start right at part two and move forward from there. And all of that is just what I've thought of so far. There's a lot of work that needs to be done just to make the final draft ready to be a book.

Then, after all of that, I will polish things up and make them pretty. Which seems to be what most people expected me to say as my only answer.

Sorry to disappoint, but books come out rough, the come out full of extras that don't need to be there and with gaping holes that need to be filled.

First drafts are like taking nothing at all, and producing a nice big block of strangely colored clay. Rewrites are what carve away all the excess clay to leave a shape that is easily identified. Revision and proofing take that shape and polish to a high gloss, glaze the parts that need glazing and paint the parts that need painting.

I never found that to be the case with any of my prose for work or school, or even most of my short fiction. It seems to be something specific to novels.