Been a while, I know, but for the past couple of weeks I was posting over here: http://fantasywritersonretreat.wordpress.com/ The retreat was fabulous, thanks for asking. Finished copyedits of book one, re-wrote book two based on reader feedback and did a bit of reading – not as much as I would have liked.
You’ll note that I’ve said ‘book one’ and ‘book two’ and not ‘insert title here’. That’s cause ‘insert title here’ isn’t altogether set, not for any of the books. I’m guessing a decision will be made soon – HarperCollins will start trying to convince booksellers to order the book next months.
Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about how I’m revising and rewriting at the moment, cause it’s become a different thing over the past couple of years. Initially, I had a series of steps worked out that I went through – I’d do up a write of each scene, and see how it was going, and I’d do a character plan, and I’d read aloud for dialogue and then sentence structure and then I’d check spelling and grammar. That’s probably why book one went through a total of ten drafts (holy cow!)
Book two will be eight drafts, book three less than that (I’m envisaging around six) and I think five to six drafts will be the most I’ll do from now on. That’s cause the system appears to be developing as follows:
1) Draft zero – after a certain amount of planning and research, I’ll sit down and write the story out. For me, this is a time to discover the land, to meet and become good friends with the characters and to try a few ideas. At the end, the real plot and story will be clear.
2) Draft one – Knowing what I know, I’ll now write the real story.
3) Draft two – Immediately after finished draft one, I’ll plot it against something Cat Sparks showed me – Michael’s Hauge’s Screenplay Structure. If there’s also a strong romance plot, I’ll run that through the romance story structure provided in Valerie Parv’s The Art of Romance Writing. This gives me an overview of how the story is coming together – is the overall pace working well. I’ll then put it aside for a few weeks and let this ferment. When I sit down, I’ll have identified some of the weaknesses and I’ll decide to whip some characters out, put others in, change parts of the plot, speed bits up and slow bits down. Then I’ll give it to my first round of beta-readers.
4) Draft three – After letting the novel rest again for a month or so, I’ll read through beta-reader comments (and meet with a couple). I’ll also plot the pace of the novel out, to see if it’s lagging in any particular areas (based on blog posts by Justine Larbelestier and Scott Westerfeld. Then, based on those thoughts, more rewriting. Once that’s done, I’ll give it to a couple more readers.
5) Draft four – Bit more resting, bit more thinking, bit more feedback. Polish, check spelling and grammar, read aloud to make sure it’s not total crock, and start submitting.
Note that all the things I said used to be my steps of rewriting – writing up scenes, character plans and so on – have become a much more internal thing – as my writing’s improved, I’ve gotten better at recognising straight away if a scene is achieving what it should, or if I’ve not worked through a character well enough because I’m having problems writing their response to something.
This won’t be the end – I’ll have to do more rewriting based on feedback from publishers and editors, but that’s how it’s panning out for me. If you’ve gotten to the point that you can finish a novel, but you’re not sure how to polish, maybe some of the ideas that I’m following might work for you too.