I knew it would be bad.
But I didn’t know it would be this bad.
That light-hearted, ‘even fun’ tone I mentioned yesterday? It’s only one of oh, maybe twenty different approaches I’ve already found in just the first half of the book alone.
And none of them work!
How did this happen? I’ve never read an early draft of mine this craptastic before. Is it because I wrote ahead blindly, without going back and editing as I advanced? The latter is my usual method. I iron all the wrinkles I can see in the shirt before even trying to smooth out an adjacent section. It worked for those ten screenplays I wrote in my 20s just fine. When I came back for draft two, the necessary changes seemed less…overwhelming.
Is it because I’m more critical now? More able to see my errors, my missteps, my complete…idiocy? On this first pass, I haven’t come close to hitting the target on anything…except those first few pages I wrote and rewrote multiple times before proceeding with the rest of the circus.
How did something this flawed take so damn long to get outta me in the first place? Surely that year could have been better spent choosing a tone, a voice, a style that clicked, and pursuing these to their logical conclusions. Why instead do I have this botched afterbirth of mad science in a broken-down laboratory whose dented, scuffed counters are spattered with the debris of a hundred failed experiments?
Reese, Reese. Always the why with you.
Why doesn’t matter.
All that matters is how.
How you fix it.
If you want to, that is.
Good point, Mr Self-Supportive.
(And where the hell have you been, anyway?)
Is this manuscript even worth salvaging? Can it be salvaged? Or is it just 102,400 of those million words of shit Stephen King says we gotta get outta us before we can produce anything effective?
Sigh.
Who did I think I was kidding, anyway, coming off ten years of writing screenplays and hoping to pull off a decent first novel.
You’re such a whiner, Reese. Shut it. Think clearly.
This is the FIRST. DRAFT.
Does it work on any level?
Well, the structure is there. The emotional arc too. The dynamic between the lead characters seems right.
The themes feel…present.
But everything else?
Everything else has to go.
On an executional level, maybe 5% of what I’ve read so far works. The rest is faeces thrown against the wall by a monkey hoping something sticks and makes a pattern that entertains somebody.
I meant well. I wrote a story I wanted to read. I put something down that meant something to me.
But at this point, it’s a blueprint at best. A sloppily drawn blueprint covered in coffee spills and food stains.
My work’s cut out for me.
I have to rewrite every sentence in this manuscript.
Better: I need to chuck every sentence in the trash where it belongs and write new ones.
Good ones this time.
- Stephen Reese
