My dudes. Hello. I’m a married woman now. And you know what, marriage isn’t that hard. I’ve been married for … TWO WHOLE WEEKS, and I’m here to tell you that not only is it pretty damn nice, it’s also just Not Hard. You do fuck all and you still remain married. You have to actively try to get unmarried.
You know what doesn’t happen if you do fuck all? The second draft of your short story. Holy god.
I’ve never written a second draft of any creative work in my entire goddamn life, unless you count the short story I did for my Extension 2 English (translation: hardcore A-levels-type English / high school final project) major work. And I don’t count that, because it was for school and it was also eleven years ago. Excuse me while I shudder at that entire class/my work. The teacher was great! The unit was good! But I was a bit of a pissy teenager and didn’t exactly knock it out of the park.
SO UHHH YEAH I’ve never hit the second draft stage of a creative writing really and it is hard. Because with the first draft, I’m all like ‘This doesn’t have to be good. This just needs to be written. Done is better than perfect, you can’t edit a blank page, Terry Pratchett said that the first draft is just telling yourself the story, write it first and edit later, etc.’ BUT YOU SEE, WITH A SECOND DRAFT, this is the ‘make it better’ part.
OH MY GOD.
OH MY GOD??
The paralysing perfectionism/fear I thought I’d more or less wrestled under control is now back. Not, like, fully back but like … y’know. It’s there. Lurking in my living room, chewing loudly and talking about its boring-ass corporate job and using words like ‘leverage’ and ‘blue sky thinking’ and, wait, this newsletter is meant to consist of writing updates, not impromptu diatribes against corporate culture and shit teachers.
WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY IS. I’ve been finding the second draft of ACCESS ALL AREAS difficult. Because I’m not really super sure what to do. I’m figuring it out as I go. Last update, I said I’d rewritten the opening scene (which was what needed an entire re-do, unlike the rest of it), but upon further examination, I decided that wasn’t super good either, so I ended up doing a different new opening scene a few days ago. Which has turned out nicely!
But the thing is. Okay. How do I try explain this in a way that is at least potentially 1) coherent, and 2) interesting.
When I was done with my first draft, I printed it out and went through with a highlighter and pen to make various notes. It was very fun. I actually loved reading over my first draft and making various edits and both ripping into my own work and scrawling some self-directed adulation in the margins wherever suitable.
The editing I did consisted of two broad types: Type 1 which is notes about high-level things that needed to change, e.g. ‘opening scene needs to be more X, needs to achieve Y, the whole mood of the piece should be more Z’, and Type 2 which is word/phrase/sentence-level type stuff, e.g. ‘wow Sunny you sure do overuse the hell out of [this phrase] oh my god.’
NOW, THE PROBLEM: Type 2 is stuff that is easy to fix. But Type 1 isn’t so straight-foward, because it necessitates either big adjustments on a broad level, or like, entirely new shit.
I had this fantasy that for the second draft, I could just have my first draft with edits on one half of my screen or propped on my desk or whatever, and then have a second window open for the second draft, and just. Do the thing. But that turns out not to be the case, because of the existence of Type 1 changes.
(Side note: I would go into what exactly those Type 1 changes are, which I’m sure would be more interesting than this vague mention of them, but that would likely diminish the final reading experience. In other words, I don’t want to spoil my porno.)
So I think I’ll be writing a good chunk of Draft 2 in a similar style to Draft 1, i.e. getting words out and not focusing too much on making the words as best they can be. I’ll put a little more focus on quality than I did with Draft 1 … but not much. I think the main focus will be to implement the key Type 1 changes (i.e. some changes in scenes, and adjustment of overall mood), as well as to, y’know, finish the thing in a reasonably prompt manner because I want to have this short story fully complete and polished by the end of November. Oh man there’s three weeks left? Jesus. I need to get going. Hmm.
I’m hoping that if I promise you all that there’ll be a complete short story by the end of the month, that’ll keep me accountable via the threat of potential embarrassment if I have no such story to show by 30 November.
LET’S SEE HOW THAT GOES LOLOLOLOL