Saturday, March 20, 2010

To Start Over or Not Start Over

Status: Excited because we're moving soon! (About a week away!)

I've finally figured out that I need to do a complete plot overhaul on Ivory. I'm going to start the awesome poster board type method this weekend to hopefully accomplish just that.

Do I want to keep going with the line edits I've done? I'm thinking I should do this plot overhaul, then redo the line edits, as the last half of the novel is worse than the first half in terms of plot.

I don't like the idea of starting over, but I really think that may the best thing to do. Get the novel in good shape, then worry about checking for silly mistakes. Looks like I started this process backwards.

Hopefully with my decision to edit for grammar as I write will help me a ton when it comes time to edit my next novel. I want to avoid this crap altogether.

Any of you scrap edits and start over because you realized you've been doing it wrong? (Not necessarily a bad method, just one that wasn't working for you.)

Thanks for stopping by!

6 comments:

  1. I always try to work from big to small on revisions, although when you're actually in a ms digging around, it can be a lot less clear cut than that. I figure there's no point making line edits on stuff I may or may not keep or change. Although I will sometimes fix or at least circle grammar/spelling/typos as I see them--I just don't go actively looking for them until I feel like the story itself is put together how I want it.

    I also don't think I've ever used the exact same revision process on any two stories. So uh... take that for what it's worth. ;)

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  2. Good luck, Meg. I've started over once with HPC - because I started all wrong the first time, and then started this course and just started fresh. Much better the second time!

    And absolutely - no line edits/grammar/punctuation until I know I'm keeping the words. Otherwise it's just wasted time. :-)

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  3. Wow, good luck. I've never scrapped that much of a story before.

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  4. Consensus seems to be wait on the line edit. Which of course is what I did first...

    I didn't mean scrap the actual story, just skip typing up my line edits for the last half. Just clarifying. :)

    Thanks everyone for stopping by!

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  5. I'm wondering still about taking out or leaving in one character in my book. If I can somehow keep him in, I'll be that much further along, but I'm still not sure about it.

    Morgan Mandel
    http://morganmandel.blogspot.com

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  6. Ugh. I hate starting over. Heck, I hate deleting whole paragraphs sometimes - especially when they're REALLY GOOD paragraphs!

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