Interestingly, I have discovered my second draft while mercilessly hacking up my first

When I am writing a first draft, I have a very strict Re-Read Nothing policy. This applies to fiction as well as blog posts and emails. Just get it all down, that’s my philosophy and then re-read later. I adopted this because, otherwise, I get all caught up in rewriting while I work and it makes the slog to the end much harder.

That said, some of my first drafts come out surprisingly well. But, of course, not all of them do.

There is this most exciting Young Adult Novel Contest going on. You can read about it here.

But, for this contest, you may submit *only* your title and the first 250 words of your book. That’s it.

250 words is very short. It is a tall order to impress anyone in 250 words.

So I took a look at the first bits of Old Novel and Mistress Novel and both don’t give you any sense of the project as a whole. I was discouraged and decided to write the first 250 words to Entirely New Novel I was planning on starting when the first two were done and submit that for the contest.

Then, at midnight, after promising to my husband I would be to bed “in a minute” I took a look at Mistress Novel. Chapter 1 was just shy of 500 words but really did end on something of a bang. “In a minute” has come to mean “between 4 and 5 AM” around here so I decide to do a little work on it. I had literally not read any of the words since I got them down in the first place so it’s something of a mess.

I decided to start hacking at it. We are talking weedwacker, nothing sacred hacking. Words were flying left and right and the delete key was smoking. I told myself this was just the “contest version” of the opening and that I could put everything else back in later so I was much more brutal than I would normally be. Anything that wasn’t vitally essentially to the scene was chopped out.

So as the dust settled, I laid down my chisel and looked at the smaller statue I had made out of the larger one. I got the entire first chapter down to *less than* 250 words.

Now, it wasn’t finished, not by a long shot, but it was a start and I decided to leave it alone overnight and ask my husband what he thought in the morning. This way, if it was total crap, I wouldn’t waste anymore time on it but, if it had potential, the chisel and I could go back at it.

But as I copied and pasted it into the email for my husband to read, something…uncomfortable occurred to me.

The hacked up version was pretty good. In fact, in a lot of ways, it’s much much better than the original. It moves faster, it has less distractions, less nonsense. Sure, version one has a bit more character development and some people like that sort of thing but version two is much more exciting, fast paced and cleaner.

This kind of bothers me.

My “editing” (if that is what we are going to call this based on results) was nothing more that psychotic, remorseless hacking up of what I wrote with nothing in mind other than the 250 word limit. Is that really what I need to do to get a good second draft? Does the fact that this version works on its own mean that I cannot add back in anything from the original? How much can you hack something down to the bare bones before it becomes too much?

Now that I think of it, I do believe Stephen King recommended this very process in editing, simply focusing on reducing the word count, and, while I have been doing massive editing on my Old Novel, none of it approached this kind of slash and burn.

Not sure what, exactly I am going to do with this knowledge in the future but it is a sort of discouraging conclusion to reach right before NaNoWriMo. No one ever likes to realize that over half of what one writes can be cut with no ill effects.