Letting My Third Draft Become a First Draft

Burnt by a Million Stars Revision Process

Full disclosure, a lot of my exercises in this process were taken from The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray, which has become a new bible for me while drafting novels! It's an incredible weekend-oriented program, but I personally prefer to take my time and complete milestones as they come. This is my number one recommended book on writing!

 

I started my first draft of Burnt by a Million Stars in early 2020, still in my freshman year of high school and right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a huge comfort to me at the time, and I finished my first draft at the end of that spring. By the end of the year, I finished my second draft and filed this novel away for good. I went on to write my magnum opus, my favorite so far, Spoils of the Dead. 

 

After finishing this, I started my current nightmare, Marionette, and became stuck on it for years, to the point of burnout. Finally, I decided to file this one away as well until I had a better understanding of what I wanted out of the plot. In the meantime, I decided to craft a third and final draft of this long-time novel of mine. Burnt by a Million Stars started out as a simple romance and evolved into something more. Going deeper into it, exploring the characters and myself, they took me to places I never thought they would go. It had been four or five years, and factoring in my experiences in those years made all the difference. I'm a different writer now, and therefore I cannot write the same book again. 

 

All that being said, here's the transformation journey as of the time I've finished the outline of my now-first draft! I plan to write through December and have a full draft by the new year. 

Mind Map

My most difficult part of doing a mind map in writing is where to start. Here, I had just finished reading through the most recent draft from the end of 2020 and found that the number of ghosts in this novel were far fewer than the number of ghosts I prefer in my novels!! So I started with a mind map of the primary kind of haunting in this first iteration, which was the shadow hand of a woman. 

What I've found about this exercise is that it helps tremendously to generate new haunting elements, symbolism, new settings, and even some playlist ideas!

Wants Lists

Next, I created wants lists for each of my characters in order to give all of them an agenda. Luckily, I already had a lot of information to work with, including all the character notes and possible additional wants and motivations from the other drafts. A lot of times this won't be the case when starting new, and that can be an issue! The hardest part of writing is making shit up. 

Aristotle's Incline

Aristotle's Incline is a simple, linear version of your plot outline that highlights the six key scenes: the opening image, plot point one, midpoint, plot point two, catharsis, and wrap-up scene. The advice written in the book includes making a list of any possible scenes that could be in your novel, determined by the kind of character and plot arcs you're working with. 

I had to adapt this for a third draft, which of course was fairly simple as I already had pretty much all of the scenes I would need. So, I made a brief list of each scene in the novel and chose the six that I believed to work for each key scene. Even though I had my outline, I still ended up moving my catharsis scene to plot point two in order to make room for a completely new catharsis scene that better aligned with the challenges and goals in the new version of the novel. It's all adaptable, always.  

 Reworking Key Scenes

My usual process for reworking and revising scenes had to make a huge shift here. Because everything was so different, including my word count goal, writing style, and even the plot itself, I scrapped most of the original scenes. I read through them each, highlighting in prominent colors the specific passages I wanted to keep and worked them in as I completely restructured the scenes. 

The main things I included in working these scenes were keeping the setting limited, working in symbolism and background descriptors, giving the characters actions, and including the climax of each scene. What I noticed about my scene list from the previous draft was that there were over 60 different scenes in a 70,000 word novel, which means my characters were jumping around a lot. A lot of these location changes/scene changes had no real purpose, didn't move the plot forward, and had no climax. In fact, a lot of them were even hard to describe in my scenes list because essentially nothing of note happened. 

Additionally, each scene was so short because they were suffering from a blank background and total lack of objective. They were doing nothing! They had no main actions, no real goals in the scenes. Adding new objectives for each scene made a tremendous, immediate difference. Actions are so important for your characters, even if it's as simple as washing the dishes. The more human you could possible make them, the better. Readers need to feel they can connect with your characters, and the most important part of that is putting them in average, human situations. 

Linking Key Scenes Together

This was basically just a loosely put together list of scenes that linked each of the key scenes to one another. It seemed a little trivial at the time, but proved to be super helpful for the outlining process, even if it was just random little ideas for scenes that would fit in the middle.

Outlining

The final and longest part of this process was the full outline of my draft. Although I had plotted with Aristotle's Incline, I found that it loosely fits into the structure of the Save the Cat beat sheet by Blake Snyder. What I love to work out of is the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, which provides so many extra details and examples, and even examples of beat sheets that are genre specific. This is such a wonderful reference, even if it proves to be too detailed for some loose plotters or pantsers. It works wonderfully even as just a starting point. 

In total I ended up with thirty two chapters, which should hopefully land me somewhere over the 64,000 word mark. I start writing in December, and I can't wait!