As I’ve mentioned a few times both here and on Twitter, I’m doing some major revisions on the WIP right now.
Look at all the notes!
Frightening, huh? (And look at the cool new flags I found at B&N! *is in love*)
Since I mentioned on Friday my method for revising, I thought I’d expand on it today. We’ve all got our own methods and processes. Some of them work swimmingly, and some of them make us shudder. I’ve done a LOT of revising over the last year and a half — I mean, a LOT lot.
Finding what works for me hasn’t been easy. In fact, I thought revising on paper was ridiculous until I realized what I wanted (and needed) to change in this WIP was going to take more than just a line or two here and there. I needed to be able to *see* the whole picture at one time in front of me. Not only a page at a time in a word doc. /enter paper MS, stage left/
I’ve talked about the usefulness of printing your MS for editing (in a different font), but as you can tell from the pic above — this is far more than editing going on. I’ve got a whole color system at work.
Green pen — revision notes.
Pink pen — notes on things to carry forward, either in this book or the sequel.
Yellow flags — where I left off last.
Green flags — things to carry forward in this book.
Red flags — things for the sequel.
*shrugs* Is it overly simplistic? Is it way too much to keep up with? Who cares, it works for me. (And that’s the important part.)
Plus, then it is two steps to get everything incorporated. Which, at first I thought, “That sucks. Why would I do an extra step?” But wait! The second step is yet another refining point. I revise (on paper) one or two chapters at the time and then go back to incorporate everything in the word doc. This way all of my revisions are getting a second look…a revision step of their own.
When I go back and read the things I’ve revised this way I can tell the difference.
What do you do? Do you have methods like this when you’re doing hard core revisions?
