revision!

Jul. 15th, 2010 11:50 pm
jazzfish: artist painting a bird, looking at an egg for reference (Clairvoyance)
[personal profile] 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?
anthimeria: Open book, says "sometimes you reach what's realest by making believe" (Books)
[personal profile] anthimeria
Every writer I know approaches editing a little differently--some people blow through the rough draft and then painstakingly edit, while others edit as they go and end up with an almost-perfect draft eons later.

My question is: what is your personal approach when working on a long piece?

Short fiction (no matter the medium) is always more flexible because you're not dealing with very many pages or words.  But how do you deal with a 150k word novel, or a 90-page screenplay?  What do you consider a "draft?"  Any tips or tricks for keeping track of all the minutiae (plot changes, character development, that scene you moved from chapter three to chapter five)?
kyoutenshi: A sheep that glows dark blue (Default)
[personal profile] kyoutenshi
Do you have any odd tendencies or quirks when it comes to your first drafts? Are they overly long, or a little too brief? Do you write them fast or slow? Are there any problems or tropes that you can't seem to stop from popping up?

My quirks )

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