One of my writer friends suggested i load my story to my kindle to have a read through first, looking for flow and any major mistakes/flow problems. This is working a treat. I have noted about 170 parts that need either tiny tweaks or major rewrite or even deletion and i'm only 3/4 of the way through!
Another writer suggested i scrap the whole first draft and start again! Apparently this worked wonders for her story. I for one, am too afraid to! But after doing lots of research for 'when' and 'where' i'm going to set my story (it is currently in fantasy land!), i'm going to try and majorly edit to fit and failing that - *gulp* - i'll start over!
Another writer, Jackie Ashendon replied with the following:
Good question. Okay, what I do is first read over the whole thing before I do anything. Then I always do the big things first - characters and conflict since both drive the plot. Are your characters consistent? Does the internal conflict work? Have you gone deep enough with it? Are their motivations clear? Have the h/h got clearly defined character arcs?
Once you're good with that, then look at each scene. Do the scenes move the plot/conflict along or are they just filler? Or do you need to add more, etc, etc.
After I do that kind of stuff, then POV fixes, language, grammar etc is next and that's usually the easy fixes. I know some people advise doing the small things first but there's kind of no point fixing POV in a scene if you actually don't need the scene at all.
I think a combination of all this makes sense to me.
I've already noticed that my hero's GMC is seriously lacking - so that will be the first thing i work on, Oh and he seriously needs to alpha up! I can't believe i wrote him so wussy!
Then i'll take a deeper look at my heroine's GMC - just to make sure my h&h clash and meld with the right things!
So thanks for the advice everyone, i feel i am better equipped at tackling this edit :)
Does anyone approach their edits differently?
Thanks for the shout-out Kerrin! And good luck with the editing. I think it's a good exercise to do because when you get published you'll have to do something similar with an editor. And getting in some practice never hurt. :-)
ReplyDelete