revision!

[jazzfish]

I have a first draft! I finished something! It has all the awkward inbetween bits filled in with text other than "And then they explain this part"!

... only it's awful. The pacing's all off, the characterization changes midstream, there are plot hooks that don't connect to anything and other parts of plot that desperately need hooking earlier. In short, it's a first draft.

I've never really gotten anything to this point before, not with something I thought actually had any potential. So I'm basically going to be making up my process as I go. (Current writing process: entire story in an OpenOffice document, with a .txt of notes and deleted scene fragments open beside it.)

How do you go about revising? Any useful tips?

Comments

[jazzfish]

I'm lucky enough to have a writer's group (the main reason I actually finished this story being that I looked at the calendar and said "crud, i signed up to submit something for critique next week!"). I've also got a couple of early readers who've turned out to be great for encouragement but not so helpful in pointing out where things need work.

Yeah, I'll try coming back to it in a week or more, and see what definitely needs fixing and what smaller things I can untangle and improve from the greater morass.

And, thank you.