Redrafting Fever

In preparation for my upcoming NaNoWriMo stint, I've been redrafting The Lightless Labyrinth.  It's coming along quite well, and the process has reignited a lot of my enthusiasm for the project.  I'll definitely be working on this book in November, not starting another one.

But over the course of this process, I've discovered something about myself: I love redrafting.  I really, really enjoy it.  Writing from a scratch is a whole different story.  When I'm writing from scratch it takes me forever to get going, and even then I often spend time agonising over every sentence, hemming and hawing over a single adjective.  I enjoy writing, but it's often a painful process, and a slow one.

Rewriting, on the other hand, is a breeze.  I can dive write in, punching up the prose, improving the descriptions (because I never include enough on the first go-through), tweaking dialogue, and just generally shifting things around.  I'm even happy to rewrite whole swathes of stuff that I'd already done.  I completely scrapped my original prologue (it was as expository as all hell), and the new one sprang out of my keyboard fully formed.  Even my main protagonist has undergone a personality revamp, and I'm pretty happy about it.  I find making changes to a thing that already exists much more pleasant than creating that thing to begin with.

I guess that's just how I work.  My first drafts are often sloppy and unfocussed; I proved that with Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity, in which I had the same scene happening three times during the book.  But once I've got the skeleton in place, and I can see the shape of the book, I can dig in there and start fixing it.  That's the fun part.  The trick is not to have too much fun with it, I guess, to know when the book is done and ready to be released into the wild.

Mostly though, I'm glad that I have some enthusiasm for the book again.  It's something I should remember when I'm struggling with draft one: once the hard part is done, the fun of redrafting awaits.  I'm already looking forward to it.


PROGRESS SINCE MY LAST POST:
The Lightless Labyrinth  - redrafted the prologue, and part 1, chapters 1-8.  Current word-count: 52,116

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I'm Reading:
The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan
Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard
Tarzan and the Golden Lion by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching:
WWE Raw
Doctor Who season 8
The Walking Dead season 5

What I've Been Listening To:
Apocalypse Dudes by Turbonegro
Pop by U2

What I've Been Playing:
Orthanc on a PLATO emulator
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Nintendo Wii