This past weekend, I finally finished Draft 2 of my work-in-progress. Because of our cross-country move, it took me many weeks longer than it should have. I finished Draft 1 in late May, so this second draft took almost six months. Fortunately, it hangs together pretty well.
And now, on to Draft 3. I hope this next draft won’t take as long, but I will have to grapple with some important issues. Here are a few of the problems I must face:
- My critique group has said the female protagonist seems too indecisive and weak. They want her to show more agency and to act more boldly. I struggle with how to show her to be the confident woman I want her to be, while still keeping her character true to the social constraints imposed on a young unmarried woman in the 1870s. I think what I need is more interiority in the scenes in her point of view to show her thoughts and feelings about how she behaves to the world.
- There is a lot of movement between locations in this novel. I don’t want the novel to seem like a travelogue, but I do want to show the modes of transportation enough to portray how travel has changed between how wagon trains moved in the 1840s and how railroads and steamships brought people closer together by the 1870s. So if I keep the travel scenes, I have to make them interesting and integral to the plot.
- I have been working on a map of Portland, Oregon, in 1872-73. I want my fictional locations, such as the house where my characters live to mesh with real locations in Portland at the time. I’ve already found a few scenes where I was wrong in how I described the direction from one place to another. (Meshing the fictional and real in a city is as hard as finding all the campsites for the wagon train travelers over 1900 miles in Lead Me Home and Forever Mine.)
- I need to take 10,000 to 15,000 words out of the draft. I am fairly confident I can do this without too much trouble, though it will take time. A few scenes might have to get axed, but mostly it is squeezing out my wordiness to improve the pace of the novel.
So, wish me luck as I begin the next draft. And that won’t be the end. There will be later drafts to fine-tune the prose. Plus, I need to develop a cover image and everything else required to turn the manuscript into a published novel.
Writers, what do you struggle with as you edit?
