Editing Process
Let me just say first this was my experience of the editing process, and I doubt many others will find it the same. But nevertheless here’s how it worked for me any why it took a mammoth ten drafts. I’m going to spilt this into four section because they where were the big edits took place. So without further ado here we go.
Draft One to Three – These will actually be most people’s draft one but it takes me the three to get things ordered. Draft one is just really a case of getting the ideas down, its really the skeleton for the rest. There so much more meet added to the bone after this. Draft two is where that starts to get added, and each chapter grows quite a bit in time. And three is where it starts to make sense and I sort of the dyslexia signs – bad grammar and spelling particularly. Spell check is great, but if you can’t recognise the right word or more often than not your spell checker asks you what language you are trying to write in, it really doesn’t help that much. This is where the good old thesaurus come into play – much easier to use and much more dyslexia friendly. These drafts really have an open outline. I have a good idea where the story is going. Key points for each chapter. However after I have finished a chapter these get re-evaluated. Some points get shifted forward, some backward and some deleted or replace. I’m not sure whether that makes me an outliner or not. I have got a strict outline but it is constantly getting changed. Anyway at the end of draft three I actually have the story that I am happy to work with. This is where before I have published on the internet, and I have to confess it was hard not getting the feedback at this stage and it took a lot to get going again. I know its shallow but I did miss the feedback a lot here.
Draft Four to Five – So instead of getting instant feedback, I took a break, tried to forget it, not that I could do that for too long. I did keep to the rule that you need to look at it from different eyes, like a book so I printed it off here. Reading it once before I marked a single word on it. After that took words out, deleted scenes, kill my babies as well as adding two or three more scenes. Draft four was transferring that back onto the computer and draft five was getting rid of the dyslexia in it. Then it was sent out to my first readers with a list of questions, and this was painful. Every two minutes I was desperate to email people and check how they were getting on. Luckily real life kept me sane as I’d just moved countries and started a new job. No time to dwell that much with all that on your plate. Also I ended up doing a lot of reading focusing around my genre and reading anything that was slightly recommended, finding some good book and others well, they weren’t my taste.
Drafts Six to Eight – Well the feedback came back and it was fairly positive. First two/thirds took too long and the last third was too quick and needed a battle scene. So through most of draft six, I was cutting the first two thirds including joining two chapters together and then spent the last third adding, including a full new chapter – a battle scene chapter. Draft six ended up having a similar feeling to draft one, although it was neater and more organised, it was back to being a skeleton of a novel. Draft seven parts got fleshed out, parts got and really took a similar fashion to draft two. At the end of draft eight, mainly ‘spging’ (spelling, punctuation and grammar) the dyslexia out of it I was happy with it and willing to send it off again. My second readers were a mixture of some of the first readers (mainly the ones that had points out the biggest need for change) and some new readers. This time it went out for longer, giving people more time. I actually managed to keep more sane this time, despite still craving the feedback, I already had some and I knew I was on the right track but perhaps more importantly I had started writing book two and that was more than enough to keep my mind off the second readers (most of the time.)
Draft Nine to Ten – the feedback came back and it was good again. All that was really left to do with nine was a word cut as I was still aware that for its genre it was too long. If I thought I had murdered by babies before and took away the unnecessary I really did that here. The other with this draft was make sure that I added just little bits of foreshadowing. Draft ten, well that was just smarting it up. And well now it’s finished and it’s back to work on book two. The writing never stops eh?
p.s. sorry this post didn’t come up yesterday as promised but I’ve been having a pretty successful writing weekend of book 2 and didn’t want to break away from that until I had finished the chapter I was writing.