on to draft three
So, I finished typing up the Frankendraft last night.
This project is completely unprecedented in everything I've done with it, from the first draft (or... two first drafts? I wrote two versions of the same story, with pretty much the same plot, just one of them is more coherent and one of them has more SOUL) to the fact that I decided to cut and paste (literally, I spent three nights, one night for each part, sitting on my dorm room floor, shivering because we hadn't got air conditioner covers on yet, gluing cut-up pieces of text to, at first, cardstock and later, when I ran out of cardstock and glue, taping them to torn out picture book pages) the two first drafts into one Frankendraft, and now the fact that it's not going to be a clean rewrite.
Normally, what happens with my drafts, is my first draft is a glorified outline. It is where I figure out what the hell is going on and who the hell it is happening to. Since this one is semi-sorta-kinda based on a real thing, I already knew what was going to happen, and even though these are technically new characters... they're pretty damn close to the people that it happened to. So I pretty much already knew all that. So instead of going through this, making an outline for it, and then rewriting from scratch, it's going to be more of a revision. But also sort of a rewrite. But not a clean, total rewrite.
Then there's the perspective. This is first person (I think past, but I also think I've sort of messed up my tenses a lot in the first draft so I'm actually going to have to make a decision on that), which is not something I write often. I am normally pretty strictly third person past, that's it, there we go, thank you very much. Even when I don't do multi-POV (which I love so much, I do multi-POV a lot but I've been straying away from it lately), it's still third-person-past. I have done first person before. My NaNo for 2017, which kinda fucked me up and I do want to revisit at some point but am slightly afraid of, as well as a weird sprawly novella that got kinda long into novel territory about one of the characters in my fallback project, both of those were first person. For this one, though, the first person really let me play with voice, and then I learned that I am definitely super influenced by S. E. Hinton when it comes to writing first person, so that's fun.
I'm also playing around with the idea of putting in snippets of another character's 'journal'--since it's first person, you really do only get the one perspective, and it might be interesting. Also something I've never done.
Also, the amount of research I've put into this one--I mean, I've put research into things before, but the sheer amount on this one is insane. Which is, again, it's based on a real thing that I got creepy into, so, like, the research wasn't sad. Except when I was reading that textbook from 1982 about Juvenile Delinquency, that was. A ride. And by a ride I mean it was mostly extremely boring, and by 'not sad' I meant I wasn't bored, cause I've been PLENTY sad.
But I start Draft Three today. So we'll see how this works out.
This project is completely unprecedented in everything I've done with it, from the first draft (or... two first drafts? I wrote two versions of the same story, with pretty much the same plot, just one of them is more coherent and one of them has more SOUL) to the fact that I decided to cut and paste (literally, I spent three nights, one night for each part, sitting on my dorm room floor, shivering because we hadn't got air conditioner covers on yet, gluing cut-up pieces of text to, at first, cardstock and later, when I ran out of cardstock and glue, taping them to torn out picture book pages) the two first drafts into one Frankendraft, and now the fact that it's not going to be a clean rewrite.
Normally, what happens with my drafts, is my first draft is a glorified outline. It is where I figure out what the hell is going on and who the hell it is happening to. Since this one is semi-sorta-kinda based on a real thing, I already knew what was going to happen, and even though these are technically new characters... they're pretty damn close to the people that it happened to. So I pretty much already knew all that. So instead of going through this, making an outline for it, and then rewriting from scratch, it's going to be more of a revision. But also sort of a rewrite. But not a clean, total rewrite.
Then there's the perspective. This is first person (I think past, but I also think I've sort of messed up my tenses a lot in the first draft so I'm actually going to have to make a decision on that), which is not something I write often. I am normally pretty strictly third person past, that's it, there we go, thank you very much. Even when I don't do multi-POV (which I love so much, I do multi-POV a lot but I've been straying away from it lately), it's still third-person-past. I have done first person before. My NaNo for 2017, which kinda fucked me up and I do want to revisit at some point but am slightly afraid of, as well as a weird sprawly novella that got kinda long into novel territory about one of the characters in my fallback project, both of those were first person. For this one, though, the first person really let me play with voice, and then I learned that I am definitely super influenced by S. E. Hinton when it comes to writing first person, so that's fun.
I'm also playing around with the idea of putting in snippets of another character's 'journal'--since it's first person, you really do only get the one perspective, and it might be interesting. Also something I've never done.
Also, the amount of research I've put into this one--I mean, I've put research into things before, but the sheer amount on this one is insane. Which is, again, it's based on a real thing that I got creepy into, so, like, the research wasn't sad. Except when I was reading that textbook from 1982 about Juvenile Delinquency, that was. A ride. And by a ride I mean it was mostly extremely boring, and by 'not sad' I meant I wasn't bored, cause I've been PLENTY sad.
But I start Draft Three today. So we'll see how this works out.
Comments
Post a Comment