I'm going to try and start writing shorter posts, to make it less of a chore for you to read. So here goes.
I'm in the first steps of tearing apart The Sometimes Sword, mostly just thinking about it. I have yet to do any actual changes to the words, but I'm making progress nonetheless. Yesterday while I was walking into the Tech building for my math class, I had an epiphany of sorts. It wasn't a specific idea for the story, more like an over-all revelation. It occurred to me that I wasn't thinking big enough, despite my intentions to reorganize the book. I needed to completely re-imagine the whole thing, from the ground up.
So I spent some time thinking about everything (you might begin to detect a common theme here about thinking...): what I like to read, what I want to write, whether or not I had pigeon-holed myself, etc. I came to several conclusions, one of which was a pretty big deal. I've always been a fan of urban fantasy, and wanted some of that feeling in my book, but at the same time, I don't want The Sometimes Sword to take place in our world. So as of right now, I am in the process of converting an existing character into a modern-day visitor to the world of TSS, sort of a Narnia/Harry Potter type infiltration of a magical world...deal. This changes so much existing material that I will essentially be rewriting the book as opposed to revising it, regardless of the scale. It's a monumental change, but since I'm writing it as a new book I will hopefully make more headway than if I had continued editing.
Perhaps this will give me the motivation I need to get some real progress made toward my dream of being a writer, and as winter break approaches, perhaps I'll have the time too.
This kind of goes along with what you were talking about in an earlier post. If you think of your first draft as more of a trial run, this type of overhaul isn't really that big of a deal. You've made so much progress as a writer since you wrote your first draft, and you've learned so much from it, you may as well rewrite it anyways. It was a good way to get a shoddy version of what will become your final version :) Now that you're better at writing, another draft will be much faster anyways, I think.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Becky, this goes hand in hand with what you've been talking about and to be perfectly honest, something you said really stuck out to me in a previous post. I never really looked at my first draft to be anything other than something I would set aside and edit later with "new eyes", but what you said about the first draft being more a way to organize the ideas floating around by basically spewing them onto the paper was something that has been bouncing around inside my skull since I read it and has actually helped me get back into some sort of writing grove. I happy to see that you yourself have managed to start shaking off that writer's depression and get back to it as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to hear that something I wrote on here has done some amount of good. Sometimes I wonder. That writing groove is really important; falling out of it to begin with was my main problem. Hopefully we can all keep pushing until we get back into it.
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