Yesterday completed my fifth day in the Land of Revisions. It is an eerie place to be, so I have decided to give it an eerie name. You may borrow it when you start your own adventures. I tried my best to keep my focus on major issues that I came across as I did my read through. There will be time in the future to fix grammar and sentence structure. Below, are the top five things that I learned from my first read through of my draft.
Step 1: Give Your Draft Some Time Off
The last time I wrote something, I went into editing mode the day after I had finished my piece. This was definitely not a good idea. Why? The story kept getting more and more jumbled as I rewrote it. In the end I had to abandon it. With my current manuscript, I took the advice of an article written by Sarah Gribbles at the Write Practice. My takeaway from her was that it is imperative to wait to put on the editor’s hat after one takes off the writer’s fedora. (Yes, it’s a fedora because my son is a big fan of them). Although I wanted jump right back into the world of Gauri and Raj, I forced myself to close my word document and hide it in a folder that I don’t use often. This was helpful because when I finally began reading the story, I was able to do it with fresh eyes.
Step 2: Read a Hard Copy
Okay, so this one was a difficult one for me simply because of the environmental issues attached to printing out three-hundred twelve pages. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any other option. I am a stickler for correct grammar, and I knew that if I read my story on the computer or my iPad, I wouldn’t hesitate to fix errors on the spot. I would then get hung up on fixing any minor issue that came up — from words spelled incorrectly to missing punctuation. But that was not the point of this reading. Which bring me to my next point.
Step 3: Focus on Major Issues First
During my reading sessions, five days total, I tried to read my story as if I was an outsider. It was not the easiest step but extremely important. Reading the story as a reader enabled me to see major plot holes. Case and point: my main character tells her love interest that she had given birth to their child via c-section but then a few chapters down the road, she and her sister talk about my main character giving birth in the back of a car. What?!!! I must have had some sort of amnesia when wrote the second scene. That’s the only way I can explain such a big discrepancy. Either way, I know that had I gotten bogged down in looking for minute details to edit, I would have totally missed this issue.
Step 4: Annotate using a Notebook & Pen
I found that having something to write on while I read was very helpful. This allowed me to take notes when I found something that didn’t work in the story. See example above! Instead of stopping my reading session to think of ways to fix problems, I quickly wrote down the chapter and page number where the problem was. This will be my jumping off point when I begin the rewriting process.
Step 5: Summarize Your Scenes
My novel currently stands at more than 130K words. This means that as I was reading, I noticed that I had forgotten a lot of the things I wrote. After the few chapters, I realized that there was no way I would remember everything. For this reason, I began to summarize the most important details of each chapter at the end. I wrote down the setting, the characters, and a brief description of what happened in the scene. This will help me when I sit down to outline my story this week to make sure that all the scenes work well together.
This is my current plan of attack on a first draft revision. Feel free to try it on your first revision or if you have your own process, feel free to share what works for you. Happy revising!