That's great! Though, I'm going to suggest that you've been working on a second draft for a while already. I say you're probably on Draft 3 or 4 now.
Okay, full disclosure. You probably know the saying that every author's first novel winds up in their trunk, unpublished...
I first started working on this story [oh my, I just looked it up] in mid-2021. It had a great start. I was in a critique group at the time, which made me generate something new every two weeks. I had a lot of it plotted out.
The first scenes were good. Most of them have survived with only minor edits and additions. From there it was a monotonic descent into lameness. I forced out an ending just to have something for the group. I would have stuffed it into a trunk if I wasn't so happy with how it started and with the whole idea behind the story, but I realized that I didn't know how to tell a good story. If I have to mention this version, I usually call it "draft zero."
So I went off on a rather extensive program of learning how to tell a story for a couple of years. Wrote a few exercises for myself, started on another novel, took another idea I had and started to flesh out the plot a bit, all the time wondering how I was going to fix this damn thing. Eventually it came to me: there was another facet of this story that I wasn't telling! I wound up adding two sub-plots and their casts of characters, knowing that these elements would eventually take me to a properly climactic ending.
Then I wrote the new subplots in, which required all sorts of mucking about: characters and locations came in in different sequences. One of my main locations was originally introduced through the view of a character who found it fascinating; now the character who first encounters it finds it repulsive. That happened a lot. Much was reworked.
I got all that grafted in, but I still didn't have an ending I was happy with. I just about gave up (again), but then the concept of how to end it came to mind—just the hook, no specifics. I printed what I had so far, did a round of editing on it, hoping that going through it as a reader I'd hit on how to get that hook in there. Instead I wound up fixing a lot of minor things, so I applied the fixes and printed it again, deliberately trying to highlight the stuff that was taking me out of the story, but not trying to fix it right then.
Three weeks ago, I really dove into nailing down the ending. I wound up building this deep network of possible plots. Every time there was a significant development, I'd plot scenarios for if it was successful, failed, or any other option. Then I went down each branch, plotting out the scenarios in sub-branches, until I had this great long multiverse of possible endings. I extracted stuff that was common to a set of branches, and then started pruning the endings that didn't work, until I got it down to about four options. They all made sense but none of them provided that Eureka moment.
But then I moved just one event around. I moved it up earlier in the timeline and boom, there it was! I wrote that ending in a burst last week, and I'm actually happy with the damn thing. I think I've said "finally" about a dozen times now, but yeah, by one measure it's draft three or four, but it's the first draft that does the story I wanted to tell any justice at all. It's the first thing that doesn't belong in a trunk (or a shredder).
I've got a few more scenes to write. I need to flesh out the subplots a bit to have it all make sense, but now I'm building each character's storyline and making sure the subplots hit the right beats and it all fits together.
For the first time, there's very little chance this thing will wind up in a trunk!
