Aah, the joys of rewriting my story. Can I count the ways? Should I count the ways? Or how many times I had to count the ways?
I actually enjoyed the rewriting / editing phase(s). This is when I had the chance to make my first novel something worth reading. My first draft was awful… to me anyway. I’m sure others would have found it awful too but I’m not a sadist.
So I’ve given the story a read through. What happens next?
For me, the first round is simply cleaning up the tense, spelling and grammar. I also tried to get rid of duplications (be they words, names and so forth). The next round was fixing the story so it outshone the plot. This included moving chapters or paragraphs around in the story or cutting them out entirely. Finally, the third round was fleshing out the bits that needed it and getting rid of the repeating parts that weren’t necessary.
So the benefits were pretty cool right off the bat. My story got better as I plowed through it. Each time was a little (or a lot in some spots) better than the last. Sometimes I’d read parts out loud to work on the flow as well.
After these three revisions, I was pretty happy with what I had created. In fact, I was so pleased with it, I decided to let other people give it a go over and tell me where I went horribly wrong.
Jon Gray Lang.com 