On That First, Fateful Reread of a First Draft....

I've read a lot of writing advice over the years--Tumblr especially is brimming with the stuff, most of it of dubious quality or so specifically tailored that it's either exactly what you need or will tie you into knots--but none of it actually prepares you for that particular feeling that is reading a first draft. If you follow the (very necessary) advice of waiting a month or more to read it, you might go so far as to be gobsmacked by what your past self did. It's a roller coaster:

"Oh man I'm brilliant!"

"...Well the last half hour was a slog but this bit here is gold."

"What was I thinking. This is a mess."

"I don't know how on Earth to fix this."

"Should I get rid of the third point-of-view character? He's hogging valuable word counts and not doing very much."

"So that's why I kept him around! Man when he's good, he's good."

"Crap this would have been easier if I could have just gotten rid of him. Why do these scenes have to be so good?"

You'll be warned that the first draft is always terrible, but there's so many ways to be terrible and you'll never know what exactly is going to confront you. Should you have dropped this emotional bomb 100 pages ago and now you have to take the ripples it causes into account when you change the 100 pages between where the bomb is now and where it should have been? Should this confrontation happen in another locale, how do we get the characters there, and how much is going to have to change after that? How many scenes do we really need where these characters talk about their feelings, which scene is the best to keep, and what should you cannibalize from the other scenes to make one really great scene? Is the story being told from the wrong point of view?

I’ve started seeing some things I do every time I write, like redundancies (seriously, how many times do I have to hash things out on the page? Why don’t I remember that I did that already?) and characters who are upset by things they shouldn’t be or copacetic about things that should fire them up, because I’d forgotten the emotional impact between one day of writing to the next. With Morgan I basically had to rearrange some scenes and rewrite maybe half of it. That was easy.

Swans is a wholly different kind of mess, and it's clearly a zombie patchwork of things I wrote last year versus things I wrote four years ago. I was slogging through some old stuff and about 60% of the way through it picked up and swept me along at a rollicking pace. "This! This is how the beginning should feel!" Only question was, how do I get it there? I suck at editing: I rewrite like a master but actually editing existing scenes? I'd much rather junk it, keep the outline, and write it all again.

The kind of editing needed here isn't one I've really encountered before, and it stems from three things I did different writing this versus Morgan:

1) For Swans, I wrote an outline for all the things that needed to happen when around the middle of it,

2) Morgan had one POV vs. Swans's three POV characters whose scenes occasionally overlap, or sometimes because they're happening separately there's mood whiplash in going from von Rothbart's garden to Siegfried's castle and not in a good way,

3) I didn't write it chronologically.

Morgan wasn't written chronologically either, but for the most part I went from A --> B --> C --> D and occasionally wrote scenes I wanted that I dropped in later as my writing caught up to them. Swans, on the other hand, had scenes from the middle and scenes at the beginning that I quilted together--the only thing I wrote all in one go was the last 30% because that's what I hadn't done yet.

I don't think this is a bad idea, per se, but reading the ending it was pretty clear I had no fucks left. I've seen some advice that says you should hold off on writing the scenes you're excited to write because it gives you something to hope for as you slog through the other bits. This clearly works for people! I've seen it called the "candy bar" technique, rewarding yourself for your hard work with something you really want to write.

Not me: I was excited to write that final masquerade scene, but by the time I got to it, it was as much of a challenge as other necessary scenes I wasn't as excited to work on (some of which, ironically, turned out to be the best bits). I was tired, had no desire left but I had to finish, dammit, and nothing was firing me up to work on the manuscript. I felt similarly finishing Morgan, but I didn't write the finale at the end. I did it about 70% of the way through and then finished writing the manuscript by adding all the bridging scenes. If they were weak, they were weak; they were necessary scenes but not the emotionally resonant ones that required my game face to make good. Writing what I'm excited to write about when I'm excited is clearly the way to go, but that's the kind of thing you don't learn about yourself until you've tried writing multiple novels multiple ways, I guess.

Still, writing out of order has its problems that hopefully get smoothed out in editing without requiring total rewrites. Like, "why are we only finding this out in the third act!? This is basic information, here!" or "why on Earth did you put these emotional high notes so close together? It makes the next fifty pages feel like an aimless stroll down a garden path."

I don’t know why the outlined manuscript is a bigger mess than the one with no outline, but it could be because this is a project I’ve been working on since college so of course it’s a bigger mess (but having a lot of writing done meant I could outline because I already had enough of the structure in my head to know where the narrative beats went). This will require more tests in the future, because I’d really like to be a tidier writer. Of course if my “no outline” manuscripts go like Morgan did, I’m clearly tidier when my brain spits things out with no forethought.