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

[sweet_sparrow]

My suggestion there would be to try and stop worrying. And also not to try fixing only the big stuff. Chances are, you'll fix smaller stuff along the way anyway. Sometimes fixing some of the big stuff may automatically fix something smaller too. The trick is in your focusing. It's fine to fix small issues along with big ones, just as long as you make sure you're tackling the big issues.

And, yes, distance from the text is as close to a must as you're going to get. If you don't, your mind'll just read what it thinks the text says rather than what it actually does, and that's not very helpful. (As a side-bonus, sometimes you may find that something you thought sucked actually isn't that bad. This was my reaction when I reread one of my stories recently. It could be better, but it's not that bad the way it stands.)