Nanowrimo is my focus right now, but that doesn’t mean I’m not spending some time with the Fantastic America manuscript. Leaving the MS alone for a few weeks gives me more clarity and distance to work with it. So once I go back to it after the rough draft of Midwestern Magicians, I hope to have a much better handle on what the rough draft needs for large scale, developmental edits.
Rewriting is tough, but well worth the effort. Not only does it make the story better, but it clarifies what I intended to say in the first place. I want the story to shine, the characters to breathe, and the scenes to come to life. Ideally, I wrote that way to start with, but even if I dropped the ball, editing and rewriting are the only ways to catch that.
Early in my writing journey, accepting that I’d dropped the ball was hard. I thought I’d written exactly what I wanted, what the reader needed, and all of it in the best structure possible. Fortunately I survived the waves of critiques that disproved those notions. I still struggle to write the best first version of my stories, but I’m comfortable enough with how I write that I’m not devastated when someone else points out a missed opportunity. I write on.