This is going to be way short. Exam week is upon us all, and all the hecticness that it brings. Had two exams today, a really difficult one and a really easy one (and now that Arabic 201 is officially over, I can start having fun learning Arabic…). Got Geography tomorrow morning. I wrote a lot today, about 1,500 words, but I’m not satisfied with this section that I just wrote and I think I’ll glance over it and make some changes tomorrow. I can tell already that I’ll be writing A LOT over the break, possibly a few thousand words a day. But I’m split between writing new material and making major revisions to what I already have…
I’m starting to see that writing the rough draft of a novel isn’t really the bulk of the work in writing a good novel (at least at my current skill level). In fact, I’m starting to wonder if that’s even half of the work. I can already see that there is a lot of stuff that I’m going to have to revise and cut out just to make my story more exciting and interesting. Also, I can see that as I write out my story idea, some of the initial ideas that I started working with will be more fruitful than others, and some of the ideas that I started with in the beginning will not be useful at all.
So, I guess that means that the rewrite of this novel is going to require a lot of work, possibly more than the first draft. But I’m not going to let that phase me! I’m just going to get the rough draft done, if for no other sake than simply gaining that experience and reaching that important milestone. And this certainly isn’t my last novel. I think that Sanderson’s approach to writing novels is a really good example of how to do it–after you write one novel you move on to another one, since any one novel has at best a small chance of getting published, but with many, your chances of getting published go up. Also, this helps you increase in your writing skills. It was Sanderson’s sixth finished novel that finally got him published, so it will probably take somewhere around the same for me.
But for now, I WILL finish this beast! And hopefully I’ll get a few short stories published along the way!
