AaronPaulley.com

I told you I would get caught up.

Written by Aaron on May 24th, 2009

My first draft crossed the 50% mark today, and it was a very joyous moment, believe me. With the due date being Saturday, June 13, I think I’ll be able to finish without too much fuss, but life is unpredictable. I am pretty much right on track, so if I miss a few days of writing, I could easily get behind.

As soon as the rough draft is done, the editing begins, which I am looking forward to probably more than the initial writing, as I already have ideas to fine-tune some material I’ve already penned. I have started telling the story to my girls at night for bedtime to get their input and refine the storyline and plot turns. They love it so far and look forward to each installment.

Typo Epiphany

There was an interesting typo in that last paragraph that turned out to be a pretty cool epiphany about the writing process. I had typed “refind” instead of “refine” when talking about my novel’s storyline, and it made me realize how much of a good practice it is to go back and refind your storyline periodically. I’ve read many novels, in pritn and online, where the story just gets lost. Lost in a jumble of characters, plot twists, diverse locales, mutiple antagonists, dueling plotlines, et cetera… You’ve probably experienced it, too, while reading. “Whatever happened to so-and-so… I thought they were supposed to be…”

One of the rules of the 30-day novel is no rewriting and no backtracking. The goal is a first draft, not a finished novel. Every author wishies their first drafts were print-ready, but that’s simply not the case. I’m looking forward to going back in a couple weeks, printing out the whole thing and reading it with a red pen in hand. Editing on a computer is quick and easy, but nothing beats a red Bic pen.

Tags: Novel