My first ever completed manuscript,
how you felt about it then and now.
My mother
told me that I was thirteen when I said to her that I want to become a writer.
I completely forgot about that, and I kid you not when she asked me then what
my surname was going to be, I told her Woods. It's incredible how things stuck
in the back of our sub-conscience for so long and become part of our decisions
when we make them.
Jumping
forward again to my twenty-nine-year-old self. Firebolt was my first completed
manuscript. Although I didn't get an agent for it, I got a publisher. My
experience with the said publisher was terrific at the beginning. Still, as the
year progressed, it became a nightmare, but this is not what this blog post is
about.
My blog post
is about my first manuscript, called Firebolt.
It took me
three years, yip, three whole years to write it. I've learned the most about
writing with this baby as I struggled to put my words and what was in my head
on paper. And let me tell you, I still struggle to get everything in my head,
on paper. (after eleven years - hahaha)
Firebolt
started out well over a 400-page book, but then I joined a writing community
and took that first step all authors fear to take, get others to critique.
It was a slow
process, and although I loved, loved my first completed manuscript, my
critiquers said that I had to cut a lot of things that became tedious.
So I started
to hack away at my manuscript to make it concise and neat, but little did I
know that I hurt my characters' most essential parts.
It took me
quite a few years to discover it through numerous reviews. And it's something
that authors, especially new authors, need to be very careful of.
It might be a
cleaner copy but make sure that it doesn't hurt your character development in
the process and their relationships.
My first
draft wasn't the final draft at the end, and I still regretted it so much to
this day that I cut and hacked away instead of just cleaning up my sentences.
That way, I could've kept the character building and the critical part of why
they were a couple and not hurt my characters.
It's still a
gem of a book with almost 1000 reviews on Amazon. I'm thinking of taking my first draft and
doing something magical with it for the tenth anniversary. Who knows...
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