I’ll be honest, I’m not used to writing this rough of a draft. I usually start the the first draft straight to MS Word and fix it as I go along — quite often I’ll draft and revise at the same time. So why am I still slogging away with some of the most randomly disjointed writing I’ve done in quite some time?
Well, one reason is that this is the only time I can afford it at the moment, considering I’m still working on the Lidwells final revision and prep for release. Another is that while I do have a lot of outtakes from the daily warmup words, there’s a lot of in-between work that I still haven’t quite worked through yet. This disjointedness is being done on purpose, to dive a little deeper with this story and its characters. Once I have a better grasp of them, the plot and character evolution gets tighter.
Normally this happens during my initial MS Word draft, quite often around chapter five or so, when I’ve finally figured out who everyone is and what I can do with them. The rest of this draft then ends up being pretty tight and straightforward with not that much major revision needed. The downside to this is that I then need to do said major revision to the first four or five chapters. This can be harder than it sounds, because not only am I creating the opening to a story, I must also make sure that I plant enough seeds of ideas that will show up later in the book.
As I’d mentioned many times earlier, writing longhand is how I wrote the pre-trilogy Bridgetown story The Phoenix Effect. It wasn’t just about ease of writing anywhere I wanted to, though. I did a lot of making-it-up-as-I-go for quite a bit before I finally figured out the story. The final version of that story is quite different in many ways to the original longhand.
This is precisely why I’m still digging through the longhand of the Apartment Complex story. Once more time opens up for me in the evenings, I’ll be able to do the same exact thing once more: rough draft during the day, and transcription/revision at night. The longhand is there for me to write down the ideas; the revision is there to make those ideas work, and work better.
Welcome to Bridgetown 