Since my NaNoWriMo adventure was done almost as soon as it started, I found this to be interesting and very sensible.
Neil, As Nov. 30 quickly approaches and National Novel Writing Month comes to a close I realize that a good chunk of my 50,000 words is utter crap. So I was wondering if you could comment a bit on your rewriting process. Do you just start from the beginning of the book and go through it page by page? Or do you skip around fixing things at random? Any tips of advice you can give would be great. Especially since I wrote this without any type of outline or without much thought before starting. So, I’m not talking about a little tweak here or there, but major overhauls to large sections. Like I said any kind of advice you can offer, things that make it seem less painful, would be great.Thanks,Steve Stanis
What I try and do is:
1) Finish it.
2) Put it away. Drawers are good. Don’t look at it for a week or so.
3) Read the whole thing, doing my best to pretend that I’ve never read it before.
4) Fix the big things. (These tend to be things that pop out at you when you read it, like noticing that you’ve led up to the prison escape, and then meeting the prisoners after they’ve escaped, and realising that it might really have been a good idea to write the escape. Or that the first chapter would really work better as chapter 5.)
5) Read it through page by page and fix the line by line things. Notice that Omar mysteriously becomes Mustapha on page 50 and stays Mustapha until page 90 when he becomes Mustafa. Pick one and make it consistent. Wonder whether anyone will notice that you’ve put Paris in Belgium. Decide to leave it there, on the basis that no-one will notice.
6) Get up in the middle of the night and move Paris back to France.
Does that help?