a finished manuscript.
today I finished my novel. please clap.
That feels absurd to say! This is just a short update, and I should clarify that it is by no means done, exactly. My writing process has been nothing short of hellish. On and off for about six years, more intensely over the last two.
I wrote a higgledy-piggledy nonsense collection of notes—a friend of mine started using the phrase ‘discovery draft’ recently, which I like a lot. It did feel like discovery. A lot of worldbuilding and Pinterest boards and a clear vision of a Cool Scene in my head with no real idea how to get there.
I wrote a ‘zero draft’ which ended up being three acts and approximately 300,000 words long, and I never got to the end of it, because by the time I reached the end I realised that I had done the middle all wrong, and also that I needed to completely overhaul Act 1 for one particular character.
I rewrote that chunk of Act 1 not once, not twice, but about four times, before I was satisfied, and then I revisited Act 2 and realised that it was spiralling out of control, and I decided it would be best to saw the novel in half a la my nemesis Brandon Sanderson, and finish it at Act 2.
This meant restructuring much of Act 2. Rewrites again.
My zero draft scenes are very scrappy and read like nothing, so having finished Act 1 and Act 2 of a zero draft didn’t feel like achieving anything given that it was a jumble of dialogue so heinous that I wouldn’t show it to anyone with any grip of the English language, and that I had handwaved all description and detail with a nebulous QQQ (a Ctrl+F tool that essentially means ‘screw it, I’ll figure that out later’).
I rewrote, scene by scene, the entirety of Act 1 and Act 2, added a fourth POV character, rearranged endings so that they made sense for a conclusion halfway through the original arc… and that is where you find me today.
At 4.58pm today, I pressed my full-stop key and I ended that sucker. Wahoo!!
I have a printed draft of Act 1 that I am currently scribbling all over ft. possible working titles (colour-coded Post Its for POV characters) and I am so incredibly excited to print out Act 2 and get to it!
Even though I have still got a LOT of work ahead of me, it feels incredibly surreal to even be able to say that I have finished a real draft.
I actually feel like a Real Author now. Look, ma! A novel!