A few months ago I was working in a job that afforded me a bit more down time than I was used to and so, knowing that the first draft of my book was almost complete, I spent a lot of that time reading as much advice as I could on how to take a rough first draft and turn it into a polished finished product. Some of that advice seemed obvious, some of it less so. Some parts contradicted others, a few common points emerged. Having just finished the second draft of my book here is what I found from going through the process.

Continue reading “That difficult second draft pt 2”

Toward the end of last year I finished the first draft of the novel I had been working on for quite a long time. I had started writing it in early 2008, took a forced break from it due to illness at the beginning of 2009 and finally reached the end in December 2010. It was the third novel I had attempted and the only one to get as far as a finished draft. I didn’t really have much of a clue what I was doing when I started it, I had a general plot and several ideas for things that would happen along the way, but other than that I didn’t know what I was doing. I think when I started it I expected I would write five chapters, maybe six, before realising I had run out of ideas entirely. But that never happened. Instead I managed thirty chapters spread over 92,000 words with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Now of course, as a thousand writing websites insist, the real work begins.

Continue reading “That difficult second draft”