I finished the first draft of Branded in mid-October. At 135,000 words, it is way too big for a young adult novel, so I will have to try to cut tens of thousands of words from it. I have already written notes for its sequel, set 20 years later.
I am happy with the story, but my writing needs to improve. After a long night of thinking about whether to go straight into redrafting it or put it away for a while and go back to another novel, I got up the next day and started redrafting it.
My redrafting is not just editing; it is a lot of rewriting. I had hoped to start cutting the novel’s length, but by the end of the month, I had added another chapter and probably about 3,000 words to its length. Hopefully, that is only because I now know my characters a lot better, so I am filling in some details at the start that will be cut from later on.
So, all up, as you can see from the graph, I wrote about 12,444 words of fiction for October. That’s an average of 401 words a day. On eleven days, I reached my quota of 500 words. During the redrafting phase, I hope to write for at least two hours a day.
Critiquing.
I received my first critique/edit of Shrinking, the short story I wrote for a Christmas anthology a few of us Australian Writer Forum writers are putting together. It’s the first critique I have had of my work since finishing my master’s eight years ago. Since then, I have mainly spent my time writing first drafts of novels, so there has been nothing to critique.
The critique was from a writer whom I had critiqued and who, according to me, can write well. His critique of my story was positive, and he found no major problems with it. His edits will be very helpful.
I critiqued another story for the anthology. This one was non-fiction, so I feel that after working with five different editors for Divine, I knew what I was talking about when I suggested many changes to the story. It’s a good story about the time the writer spent Christmas on an Indigenous reserve, but I found many things, mostly small and repetitive, that I thought could be changed. I hope he doesn’t take offence with all the red ink I put on it.
I also nearly finished critiquing the novel I started critiquing mid-August. I critiqued about 22000 words of it in four hits in October. It’s a very good novel that I am enjoying reading.
Reading.
Once again, I read virtually nothing for the month, as I was too tired at night to read. I am still halfway through Hugh Howey’s Dust.
One Response
No wonder your tired with all that writing. Congratulations on the first draft. Sounds like a lot of work to go but at least its done. Looking forward to seeing it finished. Too long yes but remember Twilight.