As an author-to-be I'm trying my best to document my writing journey without boring readers with all  the details. In my last post about writing, I discussed my struggle with analysis paralysis.  Since then, I granted myself some serious working sessions and forced myself to dive into revising my novel and tackling all the notes I had left myself.

As I analyzed the categories I had created, I realized I had the most questions about the words and language I was going to use throughout the novel. For example, should there be special names for the different roles honeybees have in the hive? And what words or terms did I need to make up to include more originality into my world building? 

After I wrote my novel, I reread one of my favorite anthropomorphic fantasies, Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies. I took notes as I read, and one of my biggest takeaways that I wanted to implement in my novel was the creation of new words, new terms that the bees would use to help define their world. One of the most important things that I needed a different word for was "royal jelly" which is a substance that worker bees secrete to feed the queen. Queen honeybees live exclusively on royal jelly. In my novel it plays a much bigger role than just the queen bee's diet, but every time I read that term, I cringed. Sometimes the words humans give to the natural world are just....weird. I needed to find a different word that carried with it more reverence for how special a substance it truly is. I also liked in Fire Bringer the terms for significant life events in deer lives, so I came up with words for various moments in the lives of a honeybee. 

As I worked through all the terms I had flagged to think about and create, I found myself thinking through a lot of the bigger questions I had left for myself to figure out about some of the magic and the new hive roles I had created. Finally giving myself--and my characters--special words to describe their world, I found that the necessary world building that my first draft lacked was coming much more easily than it had before. 

As a lover of languages and linguistics, this revelation should not have surprised me. When I took a second to marvel at the progress I was making in just a few hours of writing and defining terminology, I recalled a conversation I had with David J. Peterson, the creator of the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for HBO's Game of Thrones television series. Years ago, I was lucky enough to meet him at a fantasy convention, and I asked him about the importance of culture in creating a new language. He said considering the culture of group of people is incredibly important. For example, he could not just simply create words in Dothraki to match what words we have in English, or what words other people have in that world. For example, in order to have a word for "book," you need to have a written language. You need to have time to write out stories. And you need time to be able to read the book. You need to find value in what a book provides, whether that is knowledge or entertainment. The Dothraki are a nomadic people with no written language. It does not make sense to have a word for "book." 
​
I am by no means creating a new language for my novel. In fact, I'm borrowing quite a bit from Latin to go along with the scientific names I'm using for the bees and other animal characters. But even still, I needed to consider what was important to the bees so that they would have words for everything. And to consider what they would not have the words for. I have bees that are wild and bees that are raised in human-built apiaries. Their cultures and worldviews are different. What could I do with the words they use to reflect those differences and the messages I'm trying to relay through my story? Thinking critically about the words my characters used for their world helped me find more structure and purpose in the story itself, and it has helped me have renewed excitement and vision for draft number two. 

Back in May, I finished my first draft of a novel that I had been working on for years. It felt amazing. And then I remembered I had a lot of work still ahead of me. My excitement didn't last long as I made plans to reread and revise my first draft. 

I generally find the process of revising fun and invigorating, however I'm used to revising short stories. I have very little experience revising novels. I wrote one novel when I was a teenager, and then rewrote it as I typed it up, editing along the way. And while it was a completed novel that I did revise somewhat, I still consider that version my first draft. A complete rewrite is in the works for that novel, so I'm basically writing a second first draft.

But, back to my current novel. The first draft has a lot of promise, but as it took me years to finish and my original outline was light on details, I knew that there would be a lot of holes and inconsistencies to repair. That was to be expected, but I was not fully prepared for how much revising I'd need to do. I thought that I would set the book aside for a month or two, per Stephen King's recommendation in On Writing, and then come back and reread it and jump right into revising. As I read my draft, I marked up my printed copy and took about 20 pages of notes of things to rethink and flesh out. Reading through my story took a little longer than I thought, but I was excited by the new ideas that were flowing to fix the plot holes and issues I was finding. 

I took a couple month break to focus on making goods for a fall craft fair. As a mother of a toddler, it seems my free time can only be devoted to one hobby at a time. Now that my crafting season is over, I can settle back into author mode, but I have found that all the notes I left myself are quite overwhelming. As I typed them out, I organized them all into categories, and I realized that even my notes sometimes contradicted each other. At times I had resolutions for problems I found, and other times I just told my future self, "figure this thing out." So now I find myself in a battle against analysis paralysis.

I have so many ideas to explore for my second draft that I don't know what to tackle first. Many of them are intertwined, and I fear that if I go in one direction, that will change the path of something else that I wasn't planning to change. It's like all my thoughts and ideas are one tangled mess in my mind, and I don't want to make the knots worse by following the wrong thread or pulling too confidently at another. I know this is similar to the feeling that comes with writing a first draft. There are always those moments where I think, "this is horrible" or "what am I even doing?" But I know that progress is made one word at a time. A novel's first draft will never be perfect, and the second draft won't be perfect either. In fact, I may never have a perfect story, but I can strive for the cleanest and most polished version I can produce with my skill set. It's just getting myself moving toward that finish line that's challenging right now.

I enjoy revising. I love playing around with words and reading sentences over and over until they're perfect. However, I'm nowhere close to that type of revision yet. With a novel, especially one of fantasy and science fiction (because for some reason my story must have elements of both) and even real natural science, there is a lot to analyze and perfect. I now know that my revision timeline was too aggressive; this will take much longer than I thought. And now I must face head on the challenge of analysis paralysis and take my second draft one step at a time. Like with my first draft, I have to be okay to make mistakes and create more or bigger plot holes. With time and care, I can tackle each problem bit by bit. After all, writing is a journey, and sometimes the most memorable journeys are ones with plenty of challenges to overcome.