| Re: How do you redraft?
It would be difficult for me to convince myself that I deliberately set up draft "stages" for each aspect of a manuscript, but I did cover (at one point or another) all the key points mentioned above.
My best, completed manuscript has gone through four *major* revisions and possibly several smaller ones. After stewing on the idea for so long and having a forty page 'starter' that I wrote for a college project to keep me continually interested, I finally sat down and wrote the entire novel in one month on MS Word. Roughly eighty percent of the original forty page starter was scrapped.
I will advise the first important step from here is to put the entire manuscript into standard format (Courier, doble-spaced, proper margins, etc etc) unless you have been typing this way all along. If so, great for you! If proper formatting is not 100 % completed and taken care of early on, I promise it will come back to bite you in the ass.
This next part is really cruel to trees, but I am a writer. I love nature too, but such is life. I printed out the entire novel and bound it into a spiral notebook (after carefully triple-hole punching the entire thing, thirty pages at a time.) I made as many corrections as possible with a pencil and when I was completed, I transferred all the corrections to the electronic copy.
Trees again. I repeated this process a few more times of printing out the entire novel and going through with a pencil to make corrections. I was pleased to find less and less errors as I went along. The important thing to remember is that less than ten percent of my total corrections were made exclusively on-screen. I personally benefit greatly from having a hard copy of the story in front of me, and I imagine nearly anyone else would, too!
Anyway, the first major "print" focused around the characters, their actions and the consistency of the story; I commented on every scene by writing questions to myself all over the margins. Some pages were removed completely. Some were expanded heavily. Between the first and fourth major draft, my final chapter grew from three to twenty-three pages. The second and third "prints" focused heavily on grammar, word choice, poetic licenses, the syntax and literally anything else that conflicted with the beauty of the words or the language. I estimated (roughly) that I marked up almost 3,000 errors or weaknesses during these two phases. Only about ten total were the fault of spelling, so do not stress heavily on this.
Ultimately between the first and final draft, the novel grew from 56,000 to 80,000 words. I can say none of this was padding either, becuase I initially chose not to explain gaps in the novel that would have been largely unsatisfying for a reader to stumble upon. Anyway, my final piece of advise may get mixed reactions, but I am going to throw it out there anyway.
Pretend you're an actor.
Read the entire manuscript outloud, and read the dialogue just as you think the characters would really say it. You might feel stupid after awhile, especially if you're doing this on a crowded subway, but I promise that if you start to trip on speech or laugh then just maybe you've found something awkward or corny in the writing.
cheers,
WD |