Drafts and Redrafts and Redrafts

It’s been a busy few months, especially November, which became my editing month (as opposed to NaNoWriMo, which traditionally turns November into the drafting month). Each day my target was to edit one chapter, from the feedback I received on Critique Circle. I knew that I had time to edit the entire novel if I stuck to that target, and I managed to speed up towards the end (sometimes able to edit two chapters per day), meaning that I finished the entire draft on 24^th November.

So, as a reward for ‘gaining’ time, I can now give the blog a little attention…

This is the fourth draft. When I talk to people about the process, people fall into two camps generally: those who don’t understand drafting and those who wonder how you ever stop drafting. So, this blog can be about the drafting process.

Stephen King’s memoir On Writing compares the drafting process to excavating a dinosaur skeleton. The skeleton is the fragile story concept, and each draft is about trying to reach it without destroying the entire thing. He completes a novel in four drafts, if I recall the details correctly.

My process for this novel can be more aptly compared to swinging a wrecking ball and then collecting the rubble for the basis of the new building. There was nothing fragile about the movement between the first and the second drafts, which I suppose was because the skeleton was far from exposed after the first draft, buried in a primordial sludge of misdirection and misjudgement. A necessary sludge, I should note – because without a first draft, you can never go any further.

That hopefully explains why drafting is necessary. From the second draft, I received feedback from people on Critique Circle. Feedback comes in all forms, but the best feedback allows me to reconsider elements, and key world building elements came to light in this draft, which again significantly altered the novel.

Perhaps it’s better to think about redrafting as a series of earthquakes. Draft one to two was perhaps an 8 on the Richter scale, whereas two into three was more of a 7. From the feedback on draft three, the impact of the seismic shifts has significantly decreased. There was one major character decision that altered things, but overall, it was probably more a magnitude 5 shake up.

It's too soon to know what it’s like while the dust is settling. At the end of every draft, I inevitably think ‘yes, this is it!’ and then realise later (through reading myself or letting others read) that there are still major problems. However, I feel confident from the diminishing damage reports that it is moving towards its final draft.

My plan going forward is to submit to CC what is known in the industry as a ‘betaread’. The purpose of this is to receive overall feedback, which is different from CC’s usual week-by-week, chapter-by-chapter process. It should help me to know how well the novel as a whole is working. CC only brought this function in part way through this year; it may have been helpful, probably, at an earlier stage in the drafting process – something I will consider for future novels.

January 2023 will be the beta month, and from that feedback I’m hoping to be finished with this novel by the end of February. I feel like there are no more substantial changes to be done, though I’m happy to be proven wrong. However, if the Richter scale continues to diminish, I think the February draft (number five) will be the final one.

I’ve also been putting my ‘gained’ time to use to research short story competitions (the plan for 2023), but I’ll say more about that in another blog.

Submission Time

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but I’m now at a stage where I am ready to submit my novel to agents.

An amusing digression that highlights the passage of time: back when I submitted a novel in 2011, the convention for indicating italics in a manuscript was to underline. Naturally, I imitated this with the current novel submission, and then thought to myself, when preparing the emails, this is a hangover from the typewriter era that probably no longer exists now that everything is digital. A little research proved my speculation to be correct.

Nothing much else has changed. I wish I were in a stronger position with my ‘Writer’s CV’ but perhaps next year, I might be able to do something about that (more on that in a future blog).

Anyway, the current novel has been through three redrafts to get to this stage and is now entering its fourth draft. The feedback I have received so far from Critique Circle has confirmed that the fourth draft is more a refinement of the third, rather than a complete rewrite. This gives me the confidence to feel I can submit the first three chapters to agents to see if they are interested.

The wait time for a response from an agent varies, though the shortest promises a 6–8-week turnaround. At this stage, they will either reject you or ask to look at the full manuscript. I’ve never been beyond the stage of a simple rejection, so that’s currently what ‘success’ will look like for me.

I plan to use the interim period to keep working on the refinement of draft four. I’m in the process of digesting the feedback, although I won’t have the full picture until the beginning of November. However, the feedback so far has given me plenty to work on, week by week.

Another thing I plan to do is continue reading current Young Adult Fantasy to find new agents to query. I have compiled a list so far of about eleven agents, which is relatively small still (ideally, I’d like to submit to twenty agencies). My usual process is to let the book guide me to the agent, so it does take time to widen the net. However, the pleasure of this is being able to discover new authors.

What chance, realistically, do I have? All I know is that my current novel is my strongest to date. Should I receive twenty rejections over the next six months, I have various alternative options to consider, so it won’t be the end of the story.