Redrafting Shouldn’t Feel So Much Like Wanting to Hit Past Me Up the Back of the Head

Screw passive aggressive, my notes to self have ramped up to aggressive aggressive. My favourite piece of advice in my notes today? Cut this. Or change it to something… better.

On the… let’s call it the upside I’ve cut around ten percent of the chapters I’ve edited so far. So that’s nice. And odd. But nice. I think.

Stephen King claims that a second draft should be the first draft minus ten percent. Historically this has not been the case for me because my first drafts were bare bones and the second draft was layering in all the stuff that, you know, wasn’t dialogue. So they tend to end up significantly longer.

The process of writing Drink Me has been atypical for me in many ways, however. And it turns out this is one of them. This first draft is considerably more solid than I’m used to, which is an unexpected delight. And I’m not sure if it’s due to the fact that I wrote it linearly or just that I’ve learned to do the writing and the layering at the same time.

Either way it feels like I’m further through the revision process than I ought to be. Which is kind of lovely, and also a little bit fraught because it’s always possible I’m deluding myself.