by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Unlike the last time I tried to transition from first to second draft, this time things haven’t — so far — come crashing down on me. The structure of the novel is strong and things are only being changed here and there when it’s very obvious they absolutely have to be.
I continue to eliminate and move around scenes left and right, but that’s just the nature of what I’m doing. Now that I’m looking over the entirety of the the novel, I am seeing different ways to tighten it up as well as to juice up the excitement and entertainment value.
One thing I just don’t have at the moment is any red herrings. In a novel such as the type I’m writing, you’re supposed to have a few false leads that go nowhere. As it stands, this version of the novel, while if nothing else intriguing, doesn’t really have any such head fakes. Things move along at nice little clip and you keep reading because you’re interested in the world and the characters and you want to see what happens next.
That, at least, is the goal.
Another known unknown is how long the second draft is going to be. At the moment, I just don’t know. I’ve pared back the number of scenes, and, yet, I have a feeling that in the second draft each individual scene is going to be longer. So, it could ultimately be something of a wash when it comes to word count and I’ll still find myself at about 120,000 words.
Which is 20,000 words too many.
But I think the story itself is strong enough that if the scenes grow longer I can solve the word count issue by editing them down to a more tidy number later on in the process.
