Revising my novel: The good, the bad and the ugly
I felt quite positive when I blogged that I would finish revising my novel this month, but let’s just say now I’m having good days and bad days.
Sometimes, the task seems insurmountable. I’m working from a combination of my bright orange cards with plot points on them, an organised transfer of some of these into a list in a notebook, and my original draft in a Word document, written for NaNoWriMo last year. At times, I can paste large chunks of the original draft into my new chapter-by-chapter documents, making relatively small alterations (for example, I decided to change the novel from first person to third person. Wish I’d thought of that before!). But for other passages, I’m finding myself having to write several paragraphs from scratch.
To summarise … the good: there are some passages from the original draft which I still think are good. The bad: there are plenty that are not. The ugly: trying to intertwine the good with the new, and delete the bad, and all the while, try to keep good style with my writing - that’s exhausting. Above all, I just can’t read it as if it wasn’t mine. I’m trying to imagine how I would react if I read the same story in a published book written by somebody else. I guess it’s impossible to get those “stranger’s eyes”.
In any case, I am making progress, it’s just slower than I thought. So it’s back to the keyboard for me …
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Revision is hard, and tricky. Hang in there.