Maybe you’re like Old Me and you suck at editing/revising so when you’re trying to fix your novel after the 2nd read through you panic and think “I HAVE TO REWRITE EVERYTHING” and after crying for a long time you give up and rewrite everything. You do this approximately a dozen times–and sure, every time you rewrite certain aspects of your story get better and better. But every time, there are new negatives that arise that keep your story from ever being the best it can be. So you panic and rewrite everything again.
If this is you–try this method. Now, you will need to customize this method to yourself as a writer and to your story. I’m just going to tell you how I am doing mine, and you can tweak and turn this method to match your needs.
Organized in:
Initial Notes, Beginning Edits, Being Nice to Yourself, and Plot
First – Initial Notes
You want to have some idea of what you’re looking to change in your MS before you start making changes. I always do one simple read through before printing off, and I make notes of things I want to make sure I address when editing–this list will get added to as I go along (You’ll notice things are in different colors but I’ll get to that in a minute)
It is possible to use this method on the computer so you don’t have to print everything off, but my brain doesn’t work like that, so I printed off my entire manuscript, and I had used the “comment”s on MS Word a few times so it naturally prints leaving a large amount of room for notes in the margins.
Next I have my multi-colored pens and hi-lighters.
Each of the pens and hilighters has a specific purpose so I know when I’m looking at my notes how I intended to handle the issue when I was reading through. To make sure I have everything straight, I make a list of what each color means
That way the actual MS won’t be cluttered with explanations of what I intended–I know that if something is hilighted in yellow it means it sounds clunky or OOC and it needs to be reworded. If there is something specific I want my future self to know about these notes, I will put it in My Edits Notebook
AUTHOR | HISTORIAN | ARTIST 