In total and at this time of writing, there has been five drafts. This month, I am working on the sixth draft, and this morning, I was ready to claw my eyes out when I saw that I had repeated the verb, 'clarifies' twice in one section of dialogue! It was Dara, Anna's best friend who was doing the clarifying, and attempting to drive home the point that her old boyfriend is not duty-bound to love her, "Don is not obliged to love you, Anna". But I described it as 'Dara clarifies', once too often! I mean, this is the sixth draft, you'd think that I'd have noticed the two clarifies in previous drafts. I have decided that there will be a final 7th draft. Please God, the 6th will be the last one, the one where I look for tiny errors, and will hand it to a trusty newspaper editor to proof the final copy, that will rid it - forensically - of punctuation and spelling mistakes.
This photo might just ruin a marketing campaign. Readers will think, 'oh gosh, that book seems too long! And if that Mary O'Regan is any good at writing, why did she have to write draft after draft?' But I post this photo for all the novelists and writers who have piles of manuscripts - of the same book - in their office and who are watching and willing their book to evolve - one draft at a time. F Scott Fitzgerald did work on seventeen versions of Tender Is The Night. Compared to that, what's six or seven drafts? Only a minimum combined word count of 678 K/ words/678 thousand words.
I might get up the courage to post this photo on Facebook or Twitter one day. This could get a reaction. If you'd like to see the responses, you can do so by looking up, @luv4beginners
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| First Draft: 128 K words Second Draft: 107 K words Third Draft: 105 words |
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