My Writing Process (part four)- the "Final" Draft

I took an eight-month break from writing as a whole, other than school assignments, and focused instead on evolving my creativity and problem-solving skills- subconsciously. I never realized I was still thinking these things through until much later, but I guess that's all part of the process and how we grow!

I hadn't thought of writing again for a very long time, until June of 2022 came around, and I ended up getting Covid while on vacation and had to find a new way to keep myself entertained. I ran out of books to read, and games to play on my phone, and suddenly an idea popped into my head like it was just waiting for the perfect time when I needed it to show up: "What about that story with the twelve kids?"

Then came all the painful rereading, the cringy and bad writing equally terrible to how off the rails the story written down seemed to be from the one I had in my mind. I spent another week of quarantine looking through these drafts and separating what I wanted to keep and what didn't fit anymore. And then, on June 25, I began the final draft.

It was a long road from there. Before having the experience myself, I always used to defend writing to other people (certain annoying classmates I won't name) and explain how difficult, time-consuming, and mentally challenging it was to write a book. Except, even I had no clue how true that was until I tried to write a three-book long, entirely new world, cast of twelve main characters, intricate plot, and truly meaningful story. There's no other way to describe the process than to call it chaos. There's the plot, and then the characters, and then that one scene in the future- but what about all the holes along the way? Let me start writing a chapter that I meticulously plotted out- ohhh, that's a great opening for a plot twist! Oh, wait, that just threw my entire twenty chapters ' worth of planning off? Oh well. I'll just have to rewrite it. Now let's try and make sense of the timing, when does this all start? But that doesn't make sense, because I contradicted myself here and it doesn't work with the moons magic system. Did I introduce this concept already? Because that is very important for foreshadowing reasons. But will people be suspicious of why I added something that seems to make no sense? Whatever, it needs to be in there whether it fits or not. Dang it, my brain shut down for an hour while writing again and now I completely deviated from the planned track... Only, this is much better than what I planned, so I guess I'll have to go with it. But the new plot holes! Connect the strings, and build on top of those as I go along?

My head was constantly a jumbled mess. I couldn't think of things straight, because even if I wrote a chapter, I forgot about some important detail for foreshadowing later, and I needed to go back and write a couple of extra paragraphs just to transition it, and ended up with forty-page chapters. I got through about eight chapters just winging it with my keyboard and all the words in my head, before my dad came to me with the best tool I ever could have gotten.

Here is a gratitude paragraph for my dad, because he truly is more than half of this project. From the very first draft, I remember you coming along with me on the walks I never wanted to take the dog on and talking to me about my story idea. You helped me work through some things, develop it, and motivate me to keep going, until one day, you gifted me with a tool I will use for the rest of my life: the lifesaver under the name of Miro.

My dad helped me get set up on Miro and showed me some of the ropes, and I took it from there. Suddenly, my random ideas had a place to sit and wait, I had mind charts to puzzle out certain scenarios, tables and graphs and sticky notes and chapter planners and shapes to organize the blank slate into the exact way my mind needs to see things to understand them. One of the first things I did on Miro was create this huge chapter planning chart out of shapes and lines, and I spent a week using every waking moment at my computer typing away, using mind maps, figuring out what fit where, and filling in 38 chapters worth of detailed planning. After that, I could start writing real plot and not just fun character interactions that didn't advance the story very much, though there were still a ton of those to balance everything out.

I began to speed through this draft, and soon, I hit the hundred-page mark, something I'd never gotten to on my other drafts, and started to feel hope that this might be the one that I finally get through. I stayed reserved, though, because I'd thought that so many times at that point that I didn't let myself believe it. Only, a hundred pages turned into two hundred, then three hundred and more. In all, it took me a little under two months to spew out the original 329 pages and finish the first book. That page number would change with revisions, editing, formatting, and more, but was the base that eventually turned into the Moonbound of today!

So, the book was done. But I was far from the end.