To a great extent, writing the draft is the easy part. I’m learning that taking that initial draft and refining it into a good book is a lot of work. There are parts of the plot that don’t really work, characters that do things they really shouldn’t, dialogue that sounds wrong, points that are repeated, and that’s just the big stuff.
This is the journey from the draft to the final revision. The final revision is still in the future, but these are the first steps.
Here is how chapter 1 has evolved.
Rough Draft
The rough draft is exactly that, rough. Lots of mistakes and lots of problems. It starts slow and has a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really need to be there.
Version 1
The first revision is a big change. Now the chapter starts right in the middle of things and a lot has been cut. A lot of room for improvement though.
Version 1, Revision
Some more refinement, but also the chapter has been split to make chapter one shorter.
Version 1, Another Revision
Not very many changes, mostly a few corrections.
Version 1, Next Revision
There are number of changes since the third revision. A couple of similes have been added to replace adjectives and adverbs. There are some words that were used twice near each over than have been replaced. Some details were removed and different details added. Some inconsistencies have also been fixed.
Version 1.5
This is the first major revision since the rough draft was revised into version 1. This takes into account comments from beta readers. I’ve tried to make the action less confusing and to give a better sense of motion and location for the people and creatures. I’ve also tried to tighten up the language and make the scene a bit more vivid. Hopefully, this has been accomplished. I experimented with a version that backed up the beginning to before Aimee was in the manor, but that flopped, taking out the immediacy from the current starting location.
Version 2, The current state.
Version 2 hasn’t changed in a substantive way, but a lot of wordiness has been removed. Also, I’ve tried to make it flow better and not have any sentences a reader will stumble over. Out of about 1100 words in the last version, about 250 have been removed. Chapter 1 is getting so short now that I’m tempted to combine it with Chapter 2. I like the way this chapter ends though. Decisions, decisions.