Saturday, May 25, 2013

From First Draft to Second Draft

Finishing that first draft may seem like you've accomplished everything, but like I've said before, you'll be glad that you didn't let anyone read it.

As a matter of fact, during the revision of your first draft, most of your time should be spent in rewriting a good part of the book. Yes, don't glare at me like that, it's true. What depends is how much you might have to rewrite.

If you thought up of your plot as you went along, there will be many plot holes, and you generally need to rewrite most of the book so that the plot makes sense. For my first novel that was true, and I ended up rewriting more than half of the book. For my second novel though, I planned out most of the storyline in detail, so I'm not spending too much time on the plot, but I'm still rewriting a lot of the scenes.

It's normal if your first draft is very bad. Don't get discouraged by it. Instead, start editing. And when you're editing for the first time, concentrate on the important things like dialogue, plot, character development, etc. If you see a typo, fix it, but correcting the grammatical mistakes can come in later. What you want to do first of all is make sure that the story makes sense and is engaging and interesting.

You'll probably end up spending a lot of time on that first revision. More than any other revision, but it will be worth it. 

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