Part 5

Well, it looks like it’s about that time once again. Last week I wrote about the many different versions of what ultimately became book one, and I think this week I will write about each draft. That said, this will probably be my last blog post about my mainline series for sometime because I don’t’ want to write anything about things beyond book one while book one hasn’t even been released yet.

So, the drafts. At the time of me writing this, there are seven drafts for book one, with an eighth on the way. I don’t remember the date I started writing the first draft of book one, just that I wrote four failed versions before I found enough of the story to throw together a draft. I do remember that I finished it in November 2021, so nearly four years ago at this point.

The first draft was a pretty big deal for me personally because it was the first time I had a piece of evidence that worked against my core belief that I was a failure as a person. For most of my adolescence and almost all of my twenties that core value played a rather large role in the things I said and did with other people. There were a couple of people in my life during that period that tried to counter that point by saying they were proud of me etc., but it never really stuck because no one could give me what I considered to be actual evidence that proved that I wasn’t. It was all just feelings from my perspective, and I had yet to do anything that justified them. But, like I said, that view point was successfully challenged for the first time when I completed the first draft. But, unfortunately, things didn’t change for me overnight because the core belief found other ways to justify itself for a few years. But, that was okay. The dam cracked, and in the end that’s all that mattered.

Okay so what else can I write about the first draft? Well, a lot of what I remember about that time was me feeling stuck, frustrated, and interested. I had no reason to pursue the impossible fairytale dream of writing a story. At that time, I wasn’t doing it to create a series that I would release to the masses. I wasn’t doing it because someone asked me to, or because someone encouraged me and saw the value in what I was writing. Honestly, writing that last part of the previous sentence is kind of hilarious to me because that’s still pretty much true to this day. Sure, the few people that are actually starting to support what I’m doing it are doing it from a good and genuine place, but it still feels like I’m the only person who sees the merit in the work for what it is. Anyway, that’s beside the point.

I had a promising career path set out before me during the 2010’s, but who and how I was as a person saw all of that thrown away. As a result of that and my immense dislike of how a lot of other places treated their employees, during the time I was writing the first draft, the only way I was earning money was through being a rideshare driver. And even then, I only did it just enough to be able to buy my own food, for I had moved back home for a few years after killing off what would have been a rather cozy career. I write all of that to say that there was a period spanning a few years where I had nothing but free time and it was during that time I wrote everything that eventually turned into the first draft.

Hindsight is a funny thing because when I write now I don’t experience all that much mental friction whereas back during the first drat days that’s all I ever felt. Chapter to chapter, scene to scene, page to page, sentence to sentence and word to word I had no idea what was coming next or how to put whatever ideas I was having on the page. And as a result, I spent hours upon hours if not days or weeks thinking about how any given item in the story was going to play out. It was both immensely difficult to continue and impossible for me to stop.

So, I have a lot more thoughts that I want to share, but I’m thinking that I will have to hold off on sharing them until after book one is released so that I don’t spoil any details here. So, with that said, what can I share that wouldn’t cross that line? Let’s see. Well, for one thing, the first draft is almost an entirely different book than what the final product is going to be. I remember feeling rather accomplished when I was writing the first draft because of how I managed to consolidate a lot of my ideas in the previous versions into a cohesive narrative, which again is a wild thing for me to consider in hindsight.

For example, it did not take the first draft almost two-hundred pages to reach the inciting incident. So, when looked at from that perspective I suppose the first draft was something of a success. However, considering how different the final draft will be from the first I’m not sure how much I actually achieved with the first draft. I think the most important thing is that I wrote something that had a beginning a middle and an end, and it made enough sense from a macro level to be called a story. The first draft was also the foundation that the following seven drafts were built from, and the series of ideas throughout the drafts that combined to form the actual narrative serves as the foundation for everything I have written after it. So, looking back on it all, I am proud of what I accomplished, but man was it a process that I underestimated every step of the way.

So, in November 2021 I finished the first draft, and once all of the positive feelings that came from actually doing something subsided, I got to work on draft two. That process was a lot more straight forward because in essence all the second draft ended up being was an edit to the first draft. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I ended up cutting out somewhere between 20,000-30,000 words and I think that was the first time I felt like an actual writer.

It was then in December of 2021 that I asked people I knew if they wanted to read it, and man am I embarrassed to have given them such a dumpster fire of a product. It is difficult to explain how exactly I know that the book at that time was an abysmal mess, but trust me when I say it was. Thankfully I only sent it out to like three to six people, but even then I’m sorry for putting all of you through that.

But, not only was that choice not a bad choice, it resulted in one of the most important things I have ever received during this journey: actual feedback. My older sister was one of the people who agreed to read the second draft, and it was her feedback I was wanting the most because I knew that she was an avid reader and she also had, well has I guess, a Masters in Literary English. So while I did want to receive the feedback from everyone I sent it to, I felt like hers was what I placed the most value in.

Fortunately for me, she provided edits and comments throughout the entire draft, and it was exactly the kind of information I needed. I was worried for a time that she wouldn’t tell me the important bits since I was her brother and people do this really annoying thing where they lie to each other in order to not hurt someone else’s feelings, but based on how scathing some of the feedback was I feel that she told me what she thought I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear. Now, obviously, I don’t know for sure if she held back on anything or not, but with some of the things I still remember, even if she did hold back, she still told me enough to address the fundamental problems of my narrative.

So, if you ever end up reading this, thank you for taking the time to read and edit the absolute piece of crap I proudly presented to you as my story. Your feedback forced me to face a lot of the fundamental problems my narrative had at the time, and I don’t see how all of this would have gotten this far without your input all the way back then. So, again, thank you.

I’m going to be paraphrasing her main comments here because I can’t be bothered to find the copy of the second draft I sent her to quote her exactly. But, in essence her two main points were that my story had no plot and that my characters were not characters because there was no heart or emotion to any of them.

I remember that I was never mad or upset or anything, but rather relieved that she was considerate enough to tell me the truth while facing the potential risk of hurting my feelings. I was confused for a time while I digested each individual comment she made, because to me things made sense plot wise. Though, I did agree with her from the start about the lack of heart and emotion and that ended up being the focus of the third draft.

Draft three was essentially a rewrite from beginning to end as I finally started answering the litany of questions I had about my own story like why were certain characters even in the story to begin with. In the first and second drafts everyone besides the main character was nothing more than a writing device that was inserted into the narrative solely to serve its literary function. No one had their own agency in the sense that if that world was real then they would not be actual people in it. They were just there to do what I needed them to do. And so, by finally giving everyone their own personality, personal history and goal they wanted to achieve in the story, many of the most important aspects of the narrative finally fell into place.

So if the third draft focused on giving my characters heart and emotion, the fourth draft was centered around addressing the plot. I rewrote the entirety of the last third of the novel in draft three, and in draft four I rewrote the entirety of the first third. It was also during the fourth draft that I started consolidating ideas to make the story more streamlined. For example, the events of chapter 6 in the final product took place in chapter 12 in the first three drafts. Personally I feel that it was while I was writing the third and fourth drafts of book one that the world finally started making sense to me.

What I mean by that, is when I write new chapters in the mainline novels, I never think about them in the way I see and hear other prominent writing figures talk about writing. Like for example, there are tons of resources out there that talk about how to structure your story and how to implement writing devices, but I do not think about or approach writing in that way at all. To me, if I started a new chapter and went “okay I need to make sure that I insert rising action in this chapter to make sure that my pacing is on track” I would stop writing before I started because everything about that just feels fake to me, which is hilarious considering I’m writing fiction so it’s all fake and make believe.

Anyway, approaching writing from a technical mindset feels disingenuous to me because when I’m writing, I’m simply writing what happens next. Like, in my head, the story is playing out like a movie, and I’m just writing down what happens. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t put any thought into what goes into my narrative and why, but I guess what I’m getting at is the process feels a lot more intuitive to me and less like a checklist. Like behind the scenes I know why I’m having characters meet and interact and so forth, but I don’t do outlining or any of that other stuff. I just know that there are reasons why character A and character B need to meet, and when they eventually do, the character writing just happens because I understand who they are so to me it’s obvious what they would say and do around each other and how that would lead to where I need the story to go.

Okay, so if that felt like a tangent, then I can’t say you’re wrong, but I can say that I don’t think it was because I developed that kind of mindset while I was writing the third and fourth drafts. Now, onto the fifth, and man, did that draft hurt my soul to write.

But, the story of the fifth draft will have to wait until next week, so check out the blog next week to read my thoughts on the remaining drafts of book one. Until then, thank you for reading and I hope you have a wonderful week.