A Lesson Learned

When I was just starting the first draft of Honor Bound, the manuscript I'm currently revising, a fellow author mentioned she writes the first draft from start to finish without doing any editing or revising. She called it her sh*tty, down and dirty first draft. She finds it easier to get her story written this way and she can usually finish the first draft in three months or less.

At her suggestion I wrote the initial draft of Honor Bound this way. I set it aside to rest for a couple of months so I would be able to do any revisions with fresh eyes. During that time, I wrote the second book in the series the same way. After completing the second book, I went back to Honor Bound to start the revising/editing process.

As many of you know, I've been struggling with the process. Revisions have taken much longer than they ever did on the previous two books I've published. While writing those first two books, I revised and did editing as I went along. I would make any changes my critique partner suggested that I agreed with a couple of days after meeting with her. Each day when I sat down to write, I would take the first 20 minutes or so to read the previous day's writing and make any changes I deemed necessary. Working in this manner made the revision process seem easier and much, much quicker because a lot of the editing/rewriting was done during the writing of the book.

Every writer has their own process to get a manuscript to a publishable state.  Having written a book in both ways, I have learned that writing a quick and dirty first draft just doesn't work for me. It takes me four times as long (at least) to get a manuscript to the place where I'm ready to send it out to beta readers.

While I don't regret trying something new when writing a book, I'll stick to works best for me. In the future, I'll be revising and editing the manuscript as I'm writing the story.