My Writing Process// Part Seven: Edits and Wrap-Up

Welcome to the final installment of my writing process series! In case you missed the previous posts, you can check them out by clicking the links below.

Growing the Idea
Outlining
Research and Development
The First Draft
Redirection

This week I'm going to talk about how I went about edits. I'm not an expert on this topic in any way seeing as I only just finished my first round of edits, but I'll share what worked for me over the past year.

In past weeks, I've used The Herbalist's War as my example, but this week I'm using The Dawn of a Hero because it is the only story I've edited so far.

~The Read-Through~

This is a tip Jules gave me when I first started last year. I was kind of bumbling about for the first few months. She told me it helped her a lot when she started her edits, so I gave it a shot. It made a huge difference. I realized my story lacked structure, my antagonist was barely present (and thus, not scary), and there were a lot of childish elements I needed to take out. 

So instead of continuing on with the actual edits, I took several months and built the structure of my story by using a conflict chart. I added several scenes to highlight my antagonist (who is freakishly awesome now, btw! I'm so excited about his character!). I still have a lot of work to do to incorporate the overarching antagonist of the series, but the main bad guy in this book is fleshed out much better now. I also cut the ridiculous portions written my twelve-year-old self (or even my fifteen-year-old self). Several characters were eliminated. 

Overall, I am pleased with the results of the read-through. I found things I never knew were problems. Sure, it took me a year to fix the problems I found, but if I hadn't done it, I might never have known they were issues in the first place. 

~Revision~

I am not great with addressing every issue of my story in a single round of revision. I can only focus on a few things at once. Last time, obviously, I focused on structure, plot, and overall unity of the story. I plan to focus on characters and world building in draft four, while also double checking theme and plot. I felt like the theme was sort of drowned out during my last revision, so I want to go back and add it back in. 

When I went back through for draft three, I took each chapter and made a breakdown of scenes. I used red letters to make notes about improvement throughout the chapter using the information I gathered during the read-through. Most of these I promptly forgot about when I rewrote the chapter, but what I did remember was helpful in improving my writing. I may or may not use this method in the future. It would probably be better if I used to comment section in Word. That way my notes are right up in my face while I'm writing. 

For my next draft, I'll probably do another read-through and make tons of notes about how I can better portray my characters, especially now that I don't have nearly as many as before! There are also some aspects of world building that I know could use some better explaining, such as the Special Abilities and distance/travel time correlation. And, as I mentioned above, I want to make sure my plot is tight and my themes come out nicely. I'm really excited about this draft, y'all!

~Edits~

I'll be upfront and honest with y'all: I do allow myself a limited amount of editing during my first drafts. I often lose word wars because I can't allow spelling or grammar errors in my draft. I can't stand coming back and finding tons of red lines in my document. *Shudders* Even though I know my main focus is on the actual meat of the story, I still take the time to work on sentence structure and spelling. This is huge to me. I don't want to add several more rounds of edits on top of the ones I'm already doing to focus solely on something I could have already fixed. 

If you do this, take heart: you're not alone! There are others out there who delight in pretty sentence structures and a complete obliteration of red lines! You can still crush NaNo without sacrificing your standards!

I hope you found some of this helpful, even though I know it was all over the place. It's what happens when you have four papers to write in one week and realize you forgot to write your posts for the week. Whoops! Please do pray for my English Comp course this week. My final research paper in on a topic very near and dear to my heart. I want to make sure I do it justice. 

On to y'all! How do you edit/revise? Or are you still working on getting there? If so, I hope you can take some of these tricks and add them to your tool belt!