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I’m on my third draft of my main novel project (the first draft being a super messy NaNoWriMo draft, the second draft just being a clean-up of the first draft and a small rewrite and this third draft being a large-scale rewrite and restructuring) and it’s..hard. I love getting to know my characters more and seeing things improve, but the non-linear style and all the times I need to go back and fix something or agonize a particularly long time over a single scene can be rather frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it’s taking much, much, much longer than I ever thought it would. It’s harder, too, in many ways, because there’s no rulebook or single way to do it. I have a very long to-do list on top of the rewriting, but there’s a lot of things I can’t anticipate. I write my first drafts very, very quickly and outlining is almost effortless for me, but this is a whole ‘nother cookie altogether. It doesn’t help that this book is going in a different direction than the first draft and it was my first “serious” novel (I’ve written a handful of drafts for other novels since then, so structure and pacing is a lot easier than it used to be) so there’s a lot of cleaning up requiring.

Anyone else in this? What’s a recent triumph you’ve made? For me, I think I really, really know my characters better than ever and that’s nice. Plus, it’s finally making some sort of sense and I see a structure forming. It might take another 3-6 months to finish this whole thing (phew) but I’ll be able to present it to beta-readers with a whole lot less embarrassment, so that’s nice! As much as I’m enjoying it, I’m even more excited to be done (it’s quite a slog). I also just deleted a scene and it felt strangely freeing. I might be addicted. There’s so much fluff and it’s very satisfying to cut it all away.