Why I version control my fiction...

[prusik]

The first draft of "alttrust" went pretty easily... too easily. It pretty much wrote itself. I finished it before I realized it. (Part of this is because the story ended in a different place than I had expected.) However, there were clearly stuff I needed to fix with it before I could let anyone see it. No problem, right? I then proceeded to spend the next week or so spinning my wheels. I think I've written three different openings to the story. None of them are actually an improvement to what I had in my completed first draft.

So, I'm backing out. I'm going back to my complete first draft and trying again. I thought it needed major surgery. Apparently, it just needed some polishing. (Oh, and also lots of copy editing for consistency. Contents shifted during transport.) I can write the story I had intended to write later.

There's probably a Valuable Life Lesson here somewhere. (I'm hoping it also means that my first drafts are getting better.)

Comments

[garunya.livejournal.com]

Something like that happened to me on a couple of occasions. They felt too easy and after writing them, I felt like I still had a lot of work to do. Then when I went back to edit, there ended up being very little I wanted to edit. And they were among my best-received stories, I think. (to the beta readers, not the editors... yet)

[krylyr.livejournal.com]

For a second I was worried that you were backing out of the story altogether.

It's funny, a lot of times we have to really work to crank out a good story. When one just pops out, I think I have a tendency to eye it cautiously.