So it's generally agreed on by everyone I've ever asked (including myself, because I love taking breaks) that once finishing a piece you should let it sit for a while. So that's what I'm doing now.
I've decided that I'm going to start editing Saturday, which I know isn't that long at all, and probably not long enough, but I'm seriously trying to get the editing done by graduation-June 25th. Mainly because I want to ask one of my teachers to look at it when I'm done with my own edits. This shouldn't be a problem, seeing as the first draft totals 413 Word pages and I haven't seen the first two thirds of it in months and months. I plan on starting at the beginning and editing as I go, so by the time I get to recent stuff it will have been a few weeks anyway.
In the meantime it's been really strange not having to write. For the past year and a half I've constantly had this thing hanging over me- I've gone home almost every day and said "I should write x amount tonight". Even when I didn't actually write, it was always there, and I didn't realize what a big part of my life it was. I came home from school Monday and realized I literally had nothing to do (I didn't have homework either) and it was shocking. Shocking in a good way, I mean. I feel like I have so much free time now. This feeling of freedom isn't because I didn't like writing of course, and is mostly an illusion, but I do like it.
Now that I seem to have so much free time (at least for this week) I've also found that I cannot exist without a project. Or at least not anymore, now that I'm used to it. So I've created a to-do list that I actually plan on finishing by Saturday, filled with things I've been forever meaning to get done.
I've also not been able to fully let go of my story. Or should I say manuscript, now? (I'm so excited, now that I can rightly call it that!) I haven't touched the thing or even looked at it, and I won't until Saturday, but I've set about learning as much as I can about editing from the internet. I've found a lot of helpful information, and taken notes, since apparently I need to be documenting something. One thing I've found is different editing methods, which I'll share with you briefly.
There's of course the "Read-Through" method, which was my original plan, where you read through the manuscript slowly and make writing/plot/etc changes as you go, then rinse and repeat until all that's fixed and do one last read-through for grammar and punctuation and things.
Another method (used by Veronica Roth, as I learned this from one of her own blog posts) is what I'm going to call "Giant List of Doom Editing". She reads through the entire manuscript quickly and compiles a Giant List of all the problems with it, then separates the list into Global and Local problems and possible solutions, and applies the edits to her manuscript in sections. She also used this program called Scrivener, which I really really want to try now.
The Giant List of Doom method is really appealing to me, but since I don't want to see the last bits of my manuscript for a bit longer I don't think I'll use it. I would also have a problem with the second part of her method, which is applying edits by section, as my manuscript technically only has three chapters- the prologue(4 pages), Chapter One(6 pages) and Chapter Two(403 pages). This is because I stopped seeing the natural breaks in the story as I wrote and was really paranoid about making chapters too short, so I left that mess for myself in editing. Thank you, Past Me. It's making the thought of editing really daunting because I just have this monstrosity of a document to look at, and.... yeah.
I'll stick to the original plan and see how my editing methods change as I become comfortable with it. Maybe I'll go through and break it into chapters first before properly reading it, to make myself feel better. Once I start hopefully I'll just be able to edit and won't have to worry about the philosophy of it.
I'll keep you updated on my progress and wavering mental status when I begin. For now, I'm just letting myself enjoy the temporary reprieve and get other stuff like schoolwork done(like finally deciding how I am preparing for my AP tests) as I get psyched up for it. I'm honestly really excited for the next step.
Problems I'm Thinking About:
-chapters
-general suckage
-character consistency
-what is the title going to be??
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