To mark the halfway point for the second draft of The Holy Shuriken, here are snippets of my thoughts from the revision process. If you are deep in rewrites, persevere! You are not alone in experiencing these many weird feelings:
- My wife said she enjoyed the first draft. I can’t trust her anymore.
- Develop characters? First I have to make this legible.
- Why is it so hard to get a man to leave a room? Options are so limited nowadays. He should ‘take his leave’ or ‘bow out’. Heck, even ‘exited’ sounds ancient. I have so many ‘left’s and none of them sound right.
- Forget ‘imagine someone else wrote it’. It’s hard enough interrogating my former self to discern the meaning of each so-called ‘sentence’, or judge how a paragraph ought to hang together.
- “Do you even know the rules of grammar for dialogue,” he asked, unsure whether or where to place a question mark.
- Maybe I should revisit the story outline with Post-It Notes
- Mmmmm…a wall full of colorful Post-It Notes
- Screw Post-It Notes
- Good thing you didn’t imagine someone else wrote it, or else you’d start to really resent someone else, too
- What if my protagonist is too unlikeable?
- What if I am too unlikeable?
- My wife likes the book, and that’s one person, and that’s all that matters
Phil Gross, Game Designer 