I finished my 2nd draft!

After a lengthy battle, I have finally finished the second draft of my novel!!

To create this draft, I reorganized the plot of my first draft, and then created a second draft using chunks of text from the first draft plus new sections and scenes I wrote specifically for the second draft.

Now, I have a complete 99-page manuscript that is at least somewhat coherent, and unlike my first draft, it is 100% actual book writing and does not contain any chaotic notes to self!

The history so far

My book is an And Then There Were None-inspired murder mystery in which scientists get trapped on an island and then killed one by one :). I first started developing this idea and plotting my book in September 2021, including rereading And Then There Were None and reading several other ATTWN-style books, so I could avoid using any twists that had already been done.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I attempted to plot my book. After a small amount of plotting, I hit a wall because I couldn't picture what should happen next without actually writing the scenes and seeing the events unfold. Therefore, I jumped in to drafting, and eventually produced a chaotic first draft.

After rereading the draft, I could tell that I had a lot to fix about the structure of the book. Also, adding to the chaos, I had left a lot of notes to myself throughout the draft, like “add more conference activities here” and “look up how much alcohol would be needed to get these 4 characters super drunk.”

Thus, my plan for the second draft was to create a complete draft where my plot was in an order that made sense. And when I say “complete” draft, I mean a draft that is 100% actual book writing, without notes to myself about things to add later. The plan was to create a new outline to follow, then create a second draft by copying over text from my first draft and changing things or adding new text as needed.

I knew I had to re-plot the book to get ready for my second draft, but I just kept putting it off. This was an activity that felt pretty overwhelming. It was going to take all of my brainpower to plan a coherent plot for the whole book, and thinking about other writing projects was just too distracting. This book is my highest-priority writing project and I needed to FOCUS! So, despite my lofty ambitions for last year, I temporarily ditched Vocal to work on it.

I ended up actually not fully re-plotting the book before I started on writing/creating my second draft—I got impatient. But I at least got things organized enough to move forward. I still needed all my brainpower to work on creating this second draft, because there was so much planning and strategizing left to do. I also had a lot of research to do regarding generators, because a propane-powered generator and a power outage are important parts of my plot. I have consumed so much information about generators and propane tanks now—it was kind of extreme…

Now

My second draft is finally done, yay!

What's next

Later this week, I plan to read through my manuscript and plan any structural changes I need to make to the overall plot and plot arcs. Then, I will work on implementing those changes, producing a third draft. In the fourth draft, I will work on the overall pacing of the book, especially beefing up areas that seem to need more text, as the current manuscript is only about half as long as I expect the finished book to be.

I optimistically hope to finish this book (and get it ready to start querying) by the end of this year (More realistically, this will probably happen next year...). I will be much more sporadic about Vocal posting than originally planned, but I will try to keep you updated whenever I hit more major milestones :).

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Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.

If you're struggling through a 1st or 2nd draft, let me know if you have any questions, and I can try to give some advice!