Drafting is rough. (And that's okay!)

I know the revision process better now, and I think it's made the drafting process less intimidating.

Project A has spent the year going back and forth between my agent and me as we've worked on revisions. Whenever it's been in my agent's hands, I've kept busy working on Project B, also a middle-grade novel. Today, I realized I was on the verge of the last scene and I might as well push through, so I did. I even have a last line that I don't hate.

I made a lot of additions to my revision list today, some about the scene I was in the process of writing and some about the novel as a whole. There are some blanks in the last few chapters because one of the revision list items is to figure out how each secondary-character classmate feels about the main events, and those decisions will determine who says or does certain things that, for now, I just needed any classmate to say or do in order to move forward. The word count is pretty low right now, but that's okay because the revisions are going to add more words.

Although the concept of writing a revision list as I go isn't new at all, I leaned on it more heavily this time than I have in the past. Now that I've done such extensive revisions on Project A, I know what people are talking about when they say revising is easier than writing a first draft. I know that when I'm getting everything down, it's a lot to think about making sure each character is well-rounded but distinct and everything is consistent and logistically possible and the dialogue tags aren't hokey and I don't make people nod five times on the same page. I know that I can go back and first make sure that one character displays a particular set of traits but not too much, and then make sure another character displays a different set of traits but not too much, and then make sure someone who lived on Main Street in Chapter 1 doesn't suddenly live on High Street in Chapter 10, and then double-check the science behind the chapter with the messy experiment, and then make some of my characters shake their heads instead of nodding because conflict, darn it, conflict!

I know I can trust the process. And I'm excited to start the next phase of it in 2016!