So…
I have a first draft of The Truths We Live. I think I’ve been able to find the balance that I spoke about a couple of days ago and I’m happy with where I’ve left Bobby & co for now.
And now the waiting game begins. With the story and characters still very much fresh in my mind, it’s probably a bad idea to being working on crafting this first draft into something publishable.
Because I think it’s fair to say that first drafts should never be published. They’ll be full of errors of all kinds—continuity, spelling, grammar, etc. And something peculiar to the genre I write in, some of the more intimate descriptions of the physical action many not even be humanly possible.
I once wrote in a short story that some guy had one hand on his lovers left breast, one was stroking her backside and her was also dipping his finger in her honey-pot.
And no, he wasn’t a three-armed alien.
So whilst it’s great to have a first draft in the bag, I know there’s still a lot of work to do. And it’s best to wait for a couple of weeks at least before I start on that work.
I probably won’t wait. I’ll probably open the .docx as soon as I’ve finished writing this and start working my way through from chapter one onwards.
But it’s the good intentions that count.
The other thing that may happen as I craft a second draft is that the story itself may change. My hero Terry Pratchett once said that the first draft is just you telling the story to yourself.
He never said what the second draft is, I don’t think, but I assume that he meant it’s where you start telling the story to other people and so it has to make more sense because they can’t see what’s going on in your head the same way that you can.
