Writing first vs second draft

Writing the first draft of my book was magical. I’d wake each morning between 4am to 6pm, stretch and meditate, and write at least 1,000 words, stopping at a point where I was just hungry enough for a little more, but not satisfying that hunger, so the next morning I’d be excited to go again. The Ninety-Day-Novel course at the Novelry guided me throughout, so at 7am I would read that day’s lesson at the gym. It was wonderful.

I also kept a writing log, where I wrote how many words that day, a summary of what I wrote, and a summary of what I thought I needed to write next. After three months, I’d this nice chart:

Writing the second draft, I realized my process had to be different, but wasn’t sure how. There wasn’t a uniform process, and I thrashed around a bit. I need structure and knew that writing and revising the second draft would be messy. Here’s what I decided to do:

Each day I have a spreadsheet where I write what I plan on writing, what I actually wrote, and what I plan on writing next. I use Airtable for this, as I find it an amazing tool to use for everything related to my process, from organizing my characters, scenes, and plot, ideas, among other details. Will write about that in a later post, perhaps.

So far, the process is going well, but sometimes I need a space for bigger thinking, so for this I use Dropbox Paper, and my Moleskine notebook whenever I don’t have an open computer. I’m editing the 80,000-something word novel in Dabble because it’s just such a damn beautiful app and using Scrivener for structural/editing work.

So there it is, I am on draft 2! Woohoo!