What things to tackle first when I finish the rough draft?

[Naruzeldamaster]

So my resolution this year is to finish at least one of my original fictions. Possibly both if I keep going at the pace I plan to but I'll be happy with one, doesn't even matter which one.

Before I start making major scene alterations and/or scrapping unneeded stuff. I think one of the first things I'm tackling is all the 'x said with y tone' stuff.
I've been using this as my 'style' of identifying characters since before high school, and while I still find a place for it occasionally I think I use it way too much for it to be put in a published work.

 

[ThinkerX]

When you finish the rough draft, set it aside for a few weeks or months and work on something else. AFTER that time, read through it. It will 'read fresh.' Both the good and the bad parts will stand out, as will plotholes. Your first rewrite will be patching the big plot holes and other issues. After that, let it sit again for a few weeks or months. In the next rewrite, you fix the little stuff.

 

[pmmg]

For me, Editing is a process of coarse adjustment moving towards fine adjustment. The first pass issues are ones of adding or changing scenes, maybe changing scene order, and slowly moving towards finer and finer stuff. Changing the feel of ones language would be coarse adjustment stuff.

 

[Penpilot]

After the first draft, I start with big picture stuff and the move my way down to little picture stuff. Big picture is stuff like plot and character arcs. Little picture stuff is like sentence structure and word choice.

Edits are never linear. I sometimes have to jump up a level if I forget something or discover I need something.

Editing the little picture stuff before I edit the big picture stuff, ends up wasting time, because if I edit the sentence level stuff in a chapter/scene and then realize that chapter/scene needs to go requires heavy rewrites, that time spent editing sentences is wasted.

I compare it to buying the furniture for your house before you finalize the room dimensions or even the color of paint for the walls in the house designs.

 

[skip.knox]

It's a good, practical question for the craft. There sits the novel. All the chapters are there, the story is told.

In trad publishing, you send that off to the editor. Or maybe not; some will say you ought to make a pass; correct what you can, the idea being you give to the editor your very best effort. I'm in that camp.

Which segues to self-publishing. You yourself are now the editor (yes, I know beta readers can fit in there). So what ought one do first? Continuity? Spelling? Pacing? Start at page 1? Or at the end and work to the front? Edit on-screen, or print the whole magilla and edit on paper? Keep notes in a separate file or use the software's annotation tools? Maybe read the whole thing aloud, or have the computer read it.

So many possible paths. Even if you choose which out of the list (which above is not complete), there's still the matter of order. Which first, second, third?

Some will say editing is akin to outlining in that no matter how structured we begin, we end up working pretty much like we did when writing, defying all attempts at external order.

Even so, maybe a discussion of not merely what next after the first draft, but also tools and methods, would be helpful to some here.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Important thing everyone forgot to mention: when you finish your first draft, celebrate. Enjoy the fact that you've completed a whole novel, even if it's only the first draft. Not many people get there, and it's worthy of a celebration.

After that, try a few things, and see what works for you. The common advice is to set it aside for a while and then come back to it with fresh eyes. It's good advice and I often give it. However, I don't follow it myself. I grab my notes and jump straight into the second draft. So find what works for you.

For my second draft (technically probably not a draft...), I sit down and read through the whole thing, start to finish and try to see it as a reader would. I take lots of notes, and add lots of remarks in the text. However, I don't do many changes yet. I just try to see what the story needs, where I'm missing stuff, which chapters need a lot of work or need to be removed.

After that, I go through the thing again, chapter by chapter, and work through my notes. And from there, each pass is more detail oriented than the previous.

Main advice I can give is two-fold: work large to small. There's no point in fixing spelling issues in a chapter you're going to cut later. And have a specific goal for a draft. Aim to fix the story structure. Or work on a character's voice. Or work on your descriptions. Or whatever.

I think one of the first things I'm tackling is all the 'x said with y tone' stuff.

With the above in mind, I think this isn't a great idea. This is detailed stuff, which is important to fix. However, this isn't where you want to start. Like I said, start with the big stuff first. And only when the structure of the story is sound focus on sentence level stuff like this.

 

[skip.knox]

>see what works for you
This cannot be said often enough. Take all the time spent wondering what might be right and what might be wrong, and spend it instead on actual writing (no matter how awful the results).

Then the new author can ask a different, more useful question; namely, what *did* work for me, and what did not?

>Main advice I can give is two-fold: work large to small.
Excellent advice. I did, and sometimes still do, find this more difficult to implement in practice. I resolve to read the thing right through, only to find I have trouble finding the right focus. The notes are all over the place, from high-level to minor (I do manage to avoid making proofreading notes). The making of the notes presents no difficulty, but the using of them is the very devil.

In theory, I have various levels: book level, chapter level, scene level. But I also have consistency notes (these often span chapters), character arc notes (same), pacing, theme (because I usually don't recognize a theme until the story is told).

I'm five novels into my writing career (hah!) and still do not have an orderly and repeatable method to revision. Indeed, here I am well into my WiP and I've been revising here and there already, because I have trouble writing later scenes when I know there's work needed in earlier scenes that is foundational to the later.

Am I cheering you up yet? <g>