What? YOUR DRAFT is evolving!6/25/2022 What do Pokémon and writing a book have in common? Evolution. Don’t believe me? Have you seen what a first draft looks like?? My book has come so far from its first form—leveled up as I’ve gained experience, if you will. Pokémon metaphors aside, revising a book really does change it from draft to draft. The writing journey is different for everyone, but I hope this article gives you some expectations for how your book will change with each draft and what to focus on using my own experience. Let’s call my book Seaside, since that’s the code name I gave it. The first time I thought about this project, I wanted Romeo and Juliet set in a coastal town. My book is now nowhere near Romeo and Juliet, but it was the idea that sparked my interest. Here’s the first change to look out for: from inspiration to outline (or straight into drafting if you prefer). Ideas change. You may find your original idea won’t work for a whole story and run in a new direction. Embrace the change and trust your instincts, and that goes for every stage of writing. The first draft I wrote of Seaside was really messy and was both an outline document and a draft. I kept all my notes at the beginning stream-of-consciousness style, and about ¾ of the way through I realized the book was unbalanced and I had no idea what was going on after the midpoint turn. I re-outlined and planned out the rest of my chapters. I began Seaside around August 2020 while in college and finished the first draft early 2021 at around 70K words. I was really proud of it, and typing THE END for the first time was a moment. The draft wasn’t bad for a first try, but it had a long way to go. Expect your first draft to be messy. I let someone read it and regret it because of how much the story has changed now. After letting Seaside sit for a few months and reading a paper copy, I worked on it again in May 2021 and finished the second draft that September. The plot was my main focus in revision, and I had to fix a lot of the plot. Even though I cut the epilogue from the first draft, the story got beefier because of my changes and topped at 89K—almost 20K longer than the first draft. When to send your story to beta readers is a personal choice. My perspective is to send people something readable, not perfect, so I can figure out what’s wrong early. For Seaside, that meant after the second draft. I sent my story to beta readers in December 2021 through the TYWI free Beta Reading service for young writers. If you’re looking for readers on your manuscript, this is the place to go. The feedback from my betas is what really made my story better. I couldn’t have done it without them. What should you expect from beta readers? Honesty. And you should expect to change things. The changes really picked up after draft two. I received all my feedback by the end of January 2022 and worked through February to the beginning of May to get the third draft done, all while finishing my last semester of college—wow. In the draft before, I tried making the plot clearer, but what I really did was embellish what didn’t need to be there. For round three I cut chapters after the midpoint that weren’t doing anything, and added others to replace them. I made the story flow better, refined character arcs and gave one of my characters a new friend. I un-complicated the plot, because sometimes what’s easier is best. I changed the party location, made sure there wasn’t more than one waking-up scene, toned down the drama that persisted from the first draft, etc. The third draft was also when I made hard decisions and killed my darlings. I also tried a lot harder to make the voices of my POV characters sound different. The third draft’s word count landed at 86K. Your word count is flexible, don’t expect it to stay the same between drafts. It’s okay to cut and add things, in fact you should. Here’s a summary of the vibes for each draft so far: The first draft is for you to get the idea where you can see it. The second draft is for you to tell it again, but better. The best that you can, anyway. Third is for making it effective. Evaluate everything for its weight in the story and cut what isn’t working. The fourth? Well, I can’t tell you that just yet. We’re up to the present in Seaside’s timeline. Currently the project is with beta readers for the second time, so I can only predict what I will do next. I expect that by the fourth draft the plot won’t need much tweaking, but I could be eating my words there. In my mind, the fourth draft will be for making everything effective, focusing on voice, and line editing if I’m up for it. I recognize that I am only one human with one perspective, and one story to tell right now. Your drafting experience may be completely different from mine, and isn’t that so cool? There are many different roads to writing a story, but hopefully this gave you some guidelines for what to expect and a realistic timeline of writing a book. I have been working on this story for almost two years now and I plan to finish it before 2023 (fingers crossed eeeeee!). I hope my book is evolving into something elegant like Laparas instead of Slowpoke, but only time will tell. From everyone at JUVEN Press, we wish you luck evolving your story. Grayson Yountis a writer based in North Carolina. She attends writing classes of all kinds at UNC Chapel Hill and has a particular fondness for sharp imagery. In her free time, she drafts her own novels.
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