Yesterday, I finished Draft 8 of my romantic horror, “Whispers.”
(That’s a code name, not a title. I don’t have a title I feel good about yet. It’s in the workshop.)
This latest draft is technically draft 8 of this particular manuscript, even though this story idea has gone through probably twice that many iterations. It feels good to type “the end.” To type “the end” is to accomplish a great feat. I’ve finished a draft. No matter how many books I write, how many drafts, I still get the high of “the end.”
Let me preface why this is such a feat.
This particular story has been rolling around in my head for something like 15 years. Give or take a few years. I have tried to write this story countless times. I’ve changed the premise, the main character, the motivations, the plot, almost everything about this story several times over. I’ve written it with a fantastical twist that ended up spawning another, completely different, story. This story has been gutted and sown back together so many times, call me Dr. Frankenstein.
Draft 7 was the one, or so I thought. I felt good about it. I had a character with purpose. I like the premise. I’d cleaned it up. I’d straightened out the plot. I’d added several spooky moments that gave me the heebies.
Old Beatrice would have jumped right into the query trenches with Draft 7, and she would have eventually been disappointed.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t ready.
This time, I hired an editor for an editorial assessment.
I used Reedsy marketplace. It cost me about $1,200. Yes, I think it was worth it.
She gave me invaluable feedback as far as the plot, the characters, and things that were working and what wasn’t working. She gave me ideas of where to trim the story back and where to focus to strengthen the story.
After letting her feedback settle , I rewrote the outline. Again. (I’ve rewritten the outline at least three times by now.) However, as I was writing this new outline, I had a feeling in my gut that I was on the right path. I had a feeling. The only way I can describe this feeling is that it’s like having a sixth sense, but instead of dead people, I can feel the manuscript. It’s like a spidey sense for books. I could feel that this outline was better. Flowed better. Simplified the plot.
So I rewrote the outline and ran with it. I didn’t rewrite the whole manuscript again. Instead, I spend the last two weeks slicing and dicing draft 7 and taking what I can still use and plopping into the new draft. It’s messy. The transitions are nonexistent in some places. I rewrote the ending from scratch last night, and this morning I’ve having doubts about the changes I made.
And in the process of slicing and dicing and cobbling together Draft 8, I listened to “The Shit They Don’t Tell You About Writing,” podcast, and the guest author talked about how she’d written her novel, then went back and completely tore it apart and rewrote it from scratch, and then said something along the lines of, “if you don’t completely tear it apart, did you even do a revision?”
That is exactly what I needed to hear.
I was having so many doubts about this revision. This story. I went through these spirals of whether or not I should even try writing contemporary or give up and stick to high fantasy.
Because I was struggling to kill my darlings. I didn’t want to let go of the bits of the story that I’d worked so hard on, that I had spent YEARS drafting, that I’d poured myself into. Those feelings, that reluctance, gradually faded. I knew, in my cold little author heart, that the editor was right. Whispers was a cluttered mess. I could make it better, but it was going to take work.
Writing is work. It’s hard. It’s mind-numbing at times. It’s also one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.
With Whispers, I had gone back and forth between drafts about whether to have a “ghost hunter” vibe or a “fatal frame” vibe, and Draft 7 ended up somewhere lost in the middle. I changed the plot so many times that it was this cobbled together mess of different pieces of different plots and it was overly complicated and messy. It was not well-paced, the plot was too much, and it wasn’t a good ratio of horror to romance.
I didn’t see that when I typed “the end” on Draft 7. I had to let the editor’s feedback settle. I had to distance myself from the manuscript. I had to come back with a fresh pair of eyes to see what she saw.
That is why hiring and outside force to look at your work is invaluable. We authors struggle to see the trees for the forest, and vise versa. It’s hard to see the fractures and weak spots in our own writing, in our plots, and in our characters.
So, I have finished Draft 8. I feel good about it. I am ready to get this story off my desk and into the hands of readers. I am ready to move on to the next project. However, I must finish it first. I would rather spend another six months revising than put a half-baked story into the world. There are enough of those.
Draft 8 is a bit rough, because it’s a cobbled-together version of the new outline, and it will take time and creative power to go through and make sure it all makes sense, but I love this process. It’s like a puzzle. I’m solving the problem and fixing and rearranging until the story is ready. I love the writing process.
