You may have words, you may have 50,000 or more of those
beautiful little things, but you are far from being done. Having a finished
draft is like sitting at base camp 1. You have everything you need for a
successful climb in front of you and there is nothing stopping you from getting
to the top. It will take patience and diligence and a little luck, but you can get there.
You wouldn’t just head right for the top without planning
right? You’re not going to climb Everest in your underwear with no supplies to
speak of, so why would you send out a jumble of words to an agent or an editor
without making sure they are the best they can be? You never get a second
chance to make a first impression. (Cliché I know, but it’s true.)
This week at YA Highway, we’re going to come at you with some
ideas for revising your Nano Novel. Read each day’s post, ignore your
manuscript, and let your mind come down from a super intense month. Let the
story percolate, give your brain a chance to think about what you wrote, and
then, when you are recharged and ready, sit down with your darling again and
get to work.
The easy part is done, so now it’s time for the hard stuff.
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| No the word search is not part of the draft! I recycle whenever possible. |
For me, what works the best after I have a draft done is to
print it out. I know a lot of people balk at the idea of wasting so much paper,
but its part of the process I can’t get away from. I need to have the entire
thing in front of me. When I work on my laptop, I work in chapters, and I focus
on what’s going on in that moment. It’s not until I have the whole thing in
front of me (in a pretty three ring binder) that I can sit back and read it all
from start to finish.
At that point, I am not nitpicking. I am reading for
content, as if I were actually the reader, not the writer. I make notes on a
separate piece of paper, but I don’t stop to fix anything. Not yet. I make
broad notes; plot holes that make no sense, things a character should have
done, places that are totally unnecessary to the story. When I get done, I ask
myself what questions are left unanswered. What do I, as a reader, want to know
happened.
Then I let it sink in for a few days. Mull it over, run
different scenarios through my mind and make lots of notes. Only then, do I go
back to the printed out draft and start at page one, marking spots in red ink
that need to be changed. (Using a binder is also helpful if you need to move
chapters around. Just pull them out and put them in where they need to be.)
Once this long process is complete, I go back to my laptop
and start making actual changes to my document. Usually, by the time I work
through all the things that need to be fixed, I have a decent draft that I can
send to my betas without fear of voodoo dolls or dead flowers in return.
I hope that this at least shed some light on what to do
next, and if this revision method did not resonate with you, maybe one of the
other Highwayers will have just the thing you’ve been looking for that clicks
this week. There is no right way to do this crazy thing we call writing, and
you just have to keep looking to find what works best for you.
Good luck!
That's what I like to do, too! Although I haven't actually printed anything out yet, but that sounds like a good way to see the words with fresh eyes. Also red ink is fun.
ReplyDeleteI'm refining a novel that has pacing issues right now. Basically it's all action and no slow parts--my scenes are bigger than my sequels. So I went through and highlighted all the scenes in one color and the sequels in another. Then I zoomed out Office as far as it'd go, so I could see all the pages side by side. And I can see which sequels are in dire need of beefing up, and which ones are in proportion to their scenes. It's given me a much better handle on editing.
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ReplyDeleteKeep up the good writing.
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That's how I do all my revisions -- go through the whole thing, make notes, then go back and actually revise. Repeat a few times until I have a more polished manuscript. I don't usually print out the whole document until a much later draft, though. This process has worked really well for me so far. It makes the whole thing a bit less daunting than it would be if I were to try to make changes as I went along the first time.
ReplyDeleteIt's ironic that you chose a Mount Everest analogy today... my students and I just read a short story about a climb gone wrong because the climbers didn't have the right equipment when they came to a horrible storm!
ReplyDeleteI have to have a printed manuscript as well. If I don't, I find that I forget things... Sometimes I have to print the thing out half way just so I can remember what happened in the beginning of the story. >>