It’s been a couple of months since I wrote about my work-in-progress. The good news is that Draft 2 is finished (and didn’t take as long as I thought it would).
In Draft 2 I focused on addressing what I saw as the major problems in the manuscript. I worked through comments from my critique partners, filled a few plot holes, reworked one subplot, and spent a great deal of time strengthening the characters’ voices and development. Because this novel has four point-of-view characters, that means four distinct voices and four separate character arcs to manage.
As often happens, however, solving one problem created another. One of my four protagonists took over the manuscript in Draft 2 in ways I didn’t want her to. By the end of Draft 2, she had accumulated nearly 8,000 more words in the text than any of the other three. She’s an important character, but I don’t want her to overshadow the others, so the balance of the novel shifted more than I intended.
That gives me a clear focus for Draft 3. Instead of revising the manuscript straight through, I will work on one character at a time.
I’m starting with the character whose story has grown the most, reading every scene written in her point of view to decide how to cut. My goal isn’t simply to make the manuscript shorter. I want to preserve what makes her voice distinctive—the way she sees the world, interprets events, and grows over the course of the journey.
The challenge is finding places where I’ve repeated an idea, let a scene go on too long, or included details that don’t move the story or character forward. I want to tighten her chapters without losing the heart of her story. Every cut should make her story stronger, not smaller.
Overall, I’m pleased with where the novel stands at this stage of the editing process. Each draft of a novel reveals strengths and weaknesses that weren’t obvious before, and each revision brings me a little closer to the story I set out to tell. These are four incredible women, and I’m looking forward to readers getting to meet them.
I’ll be in revision mode for several more months, giving each of the four women the attention she deserves. With Draft 3 underway, I feel like I am moving toward the book I hope readers will one day hold in their hands.
Have you ever worked on a project that required multiple rounds of revision? What kept you going?
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All my novels and the non-fiction I wrote needed several rounds of revision. I guess perfectionism helps with getting it going…