First draft completed

Last night around 00:15 I completed the first draft of my novel in progress. 164,396 words in the draft, although considerably more words were written along the way (five chapters were rewritten from scratch, and numerous other small edits were made along the way, of course). It was 87 days since I started the novel, on the evening of July 22, for an average of 1,889 words per day, which I'm quite happy with considering that I can only work on it for at most two or three hours a day, on a good day.

This is the longest piece of writing I've ever completed. The tiny demons of self-doubt made a few sallies during that time, but I managed to suppress them. However this is only the first draft (well, the prologue and chapters 1-4 are on their second full drafts... actually, so is chapter 23, come to think of it, which I wrote from the wrong character's POV the first time around).

Now the hard part begins: rewriting chapters 5-32 and the epilogue from scratch again, incorporating all the new developments I came up with along the way. There's entire organizations I invented for background, who aren't mentioned until 2/3 of the way through now (because that's when I came up with them), and they need to be integrated into the story, for the sake of world-building and flavor. I'm pretty happy with the main story and character development, and it ends in a good place: this is the first novel in a planned trilogy.

Rewriting entire chapters from scratch is painfully difficult, but it is necessary. Once I've got all the story beats in place properly, the final phase will be to go over the prose with a fine-toothed comb, making sure it flows, and that every paragraph, sentence, and line of dialogue is as compact and interesting as possible. 164k words is a lot longer than the average novel, as I understand it, but I don't think there's any unnecessary elements. (Although I'm sure I'll come across some as I'm rewriting.) There are, however, quite a lot of elaborations on things that could stand to be trimmed down.

Drowning Your Sorrows

Freddy: You may be a writer, honey.
Peggy: Really?
Freddy: You're arrogant.
(the guys laugh)
Don: You want another drink?
Peggy: I don't know.
Don/Freddy: Not a writer.
(everyone laughs)

I love drinking. I love writing. I'm slowly learning that doing both at the same time puts a bullet through the head of my productivity.

The Lure of Editing

Hello, world.

Editing is alluring. On the one hand, it's highly satisfying to go back and strip my prose down to the fewest number of words that can convey what I want to convey. Removing redundancies, choosing more precise adjectives, and grinding that paragraph down to a hard, diamond core is a nice feeling.

On the other hand... that's the very last thing I should be doing. It's a necessary step, yes, but it's still the very last step. It's a lot easier to attack a single paragraph and make it good, than it is to examine my story as a whole and realize that an entire 5,000-word chapter—or several—needs to be discarded, or rewritten from scratch, or (worst of all) moved to another point in the story and then partially rewritten. It's surgery of the mind, and it's terrifyingly difficult.

Distancing myself from declaring every first attempt "pretty good" is one of the fundamentals of good writing. My first attempts aren't any good. No one's is, except by occasional happenstance. Once I commit myself to the idea that writing is rewriting, that when I write a chapter for the first time I should wait a week, come back, and write it again from scratch without referencing the first pass... only then have I taken the first step.

And of course, just because I was able to do it once, doesn't make it any easier the next time.