It's been about four weeks since I printed out my NaNoWriMo novel and hid it in a drawer. In two weeks I will take it out of the drawer, and read it.
And then I will start editing it. Or at least I will if it's not irredeemable tripe.
As this day comes closer, I have been thinking about how I am going to do the edit. I would expect that it will be a multi-phase process.
Actually, I have a fair idea of some pretty critical changes I will need to make before anyone gets to read the story:
1. abandon first person - I tried writing the story in first person, but that is untenable. The basic problem is that nothing that happens away from the central character's perception can be described directly. The most obvious symptom of that is the meetings I kept on having, and the huge gobs of exposition-as-conversation which turned up to derail the momentum.
2. rehabilitate gooseberries - I've got some characters which need to be either edited out or beefed up. There are two in particular who seem to have no real purpose in the story, and who barely speak. And yet some of the most effective dialog is between one of those characters and the central character, and they have the potential to be quite significant. They were just casualties of the first person perspective: all their action happened where the central character wasn't.
3. rearrange things - there are some quite entertaining bits of dialog and description (well, they were entertaining to write...) which turned up in the final scene which should have been much earlier in the story, but I only thought of them when I was writing the final scene so that's where they ended up.
... and I am sure that there will be numerous typoes, grammatical clunks, strained dialog, poorly developed characters, and all the other inevitable consequences of writing too quickly.
So, I will begin by reading the story with a pad next to me. I'll make notes there on whatever piques my interest, since the first reading is more to reacquaint myself with what I've written than anything else. I will also make notes on the manuscript.
The second reading is where I start to get structured: I will make notes on specific characters, their interrelationships, the structure of the plot, and any significant holes.
Then I'll start working on things like the broad brush changes: the perspective change, the major rearrangements, filling the holes in time, and so on.
We'll see where we are by the end of January. I hope to have a readable second draft by then.
But it begins in two weeks.
Posted by Dunx at December 16, 2004 11:20 AM
Do potential readers have to wait for the second draft?
Even before looking, though, I'd like to put a word in for the gooseberries. Don't sacrifice good dialogue just because it doesn't seem to serve a purpose. There's more to your tale than the bald drive from A to B. Sometimes the decorative flourishes can be as significant as the main drag.
(There may be a hint of defensiveness in this advice, since my own work consists of nothing but decoration, but hopefully some kind of point survives beyond the self-serving fluff. Don't stifle your interesting characters: they may seem superfluous, but they help to build a world.)
Well, I'm not sure. I'm blowing a bit hard in this post and my second draft may well not be quite as extensive as I make out, precisely for the reason you imply: I am keen to get feedback, which I cannot get if I am locked in analysis paralysis on the second draft.
I'll definitely be doing some shuffling and filling before I send the thing out to those who are interested, but it may be more like a v1.5 than a v2.