First draft complete. What’s next?

I posted happily on Facebook to tell my friends I’d completed my first full draft of my book on early mother loss and resilience. While rather breathlessly writing the Facebook post, I realized I need a plan for how to handle this draft and conjure the next one, so I made a quick list of the steps I’ll take, from high level structural changes/improvements to adding the most compelling details I may have misjudged in the first draft. This is the list I posted: 

(1) Read through once, refining THE story arc and noting worthwhile subsidiary ones.

(2) Resolve where to set up, and then answer, questions about my parents’ lives.

(3) Read through again, highlighting stuff that can be removed.

(4) Read through again, looking for obvious places to add “best examples” to illustrate the main story arc. Title each of the 3 sections. Choose chapter breaks. Try to have 12 to 16 chapters.

(5) Do a complete rewrite, referring to notes I’ve compiled. Try to finish next draft within 6 months. (This first draft took four and a half years.)

The story arc takes the protagonist (“me,” the character) through these changes: She is thriving and bold, she is bereaved and helpless, she is resolute, she is inspired and exuberant. She goes from trying to live out her mom’s view of her (which she only understands from an eleven-year-old’s perspective) to embracing the real life that is hers to live.

And here’s how it’s going, now that I’ve read and marked up more than 100 pages of my 340-page manuscript in a first read-through:

I’m pretty easily able to see where the writing wanders away from the story arc. So I’m marking stuff to remove. 

I started a new, blank Scrivener project. I’m creating an outline in it by writing scene descriptors in each text document’s title field. Then in the Synopsis and Notes field for each one, I’m writing a synopsis and a clear statement of the purpose of the scene — that is, how exactly the scene serves the story arc. Is it presenting a new challege to “Fran,” is it showing how she copes and overcomes (or how she tries to cope and digs herself into a hole), is it showing how a relationship works, is the character on the road to getting what she needs or is it a setback, and so on.

I’m finding that some scenes aren’t really scenes, but are blobs of reported events and feelings that can be teased out into several scenes if each part clearly advances the story. And some don’t. And that’s good, because the draft is too long.

For now at least, I feel like I’m planning an effective rewrite and building its scaffold. I can tell it will be a very different iteration of the story from what Leslie, my writing partner, has seen.