I finished my trash draft / shitty first draft / zero draft today for my rival-to-lovers cross country story! My brain has been on fire this last week as I neared the end and I felt like I couldn’t get the words on the page fast enough. Stayed up late last night getting out what I could and when I sat down today I found that I really only had one final scene to fill in. By one o’clock at the Writing Center, I was done.
I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a quick readthrough – not taking notes or making serious edits but checking for obvious errors (like names being different . . . there were a lot of those, oops) before I sent it off to two of my friends who’ve agreed to beta read this draft. It’s a little scary. With my last story, I edited the zero draft to a shareable first draft before asking for feedback but I actually feel like I need feedback earlier before I do major revisions and both my friends are writers and understand the nature of zero drafts. The words aren’t perfect. There are some obvious parts of the story that need to be stronger. I have a couple of scenes that are just bizarre right now but I’m not sure what to do with them yet.
I feel like my thought functioning has shut down now that I’m finished. I am exhausted. Sleepy. Emotionally wrought. Yes, I did cry while writing my final scenes. I’m not sure if it was because I was capturing the emotion of the captures or that I was just so thrilled to be almost done with this draft that has taken me so long to get off the ground.
It’s about 74,000 words right now. I suspect it will be longer in revisions, even after making some cuts, but we’ll see. I have a tendency to rush the endings and drag out the beginnings . . . that’s what my last story taught me at least. We’ll find out how I did this time around.
I will say, working on a detailed synopsis/outline this time helped a lot for moving me through this draft without getting stuck or going back to edit before I was done. I kept the outline up and highlighted the part I was on and made myself write through it chronologically. It was a new way to write for me, but it got this draft done start to finish in about 10 weeks. I had some material to work from but the synopsis did the heavy lifting.
Most likely I’m going to take a week or two off and let this story sit before I start on revisions in August. My brain needs a break so I can revisit the manuscript with fresh eyes.
With Love,
Natalie