Homepage
Login
New Post
Profile
It's fine to go back and edit, if you're focusing on arc or major plot points. If one of your first key scenes needs to be completely rewritten, have the events change, etc, then going back and doing substantive editing is totally fine. But worrying about flow, word choice, etc is line editing, and you can get stuck in analysis paralysis.
I suggest using Scrivener, which is an awesome tool. Even if you're stuck with Word, you can still skip all over the book, adding whatever scene is stuck in your head, just not as easily. That assumes you have at least a sense of the overall character arcs in your book. Scrivener has a handy annotation tool, so if there's a small but important detail that's changed or needs to be added, you just type in a reminder for later and get back to new scenes.
If you're going to line edit, do it the next day to get yourself back in the flow of the story, and then move on. The main goal is to keep your word count increasing steadily every week. Feel free to skip a day or two, as long as you keep a consistent average pace. Just 750 words a day gets you 90K words in 4 months. A month to plan and a month to edit means you can turn out a second draft every six months. Of course critiques and edits will drag on voer time.
If you're not a plotter at all, and instead just write a bunch of words having no idea what your story is about or what will happen, and later try to corral the 300 or so pages later into a coherent plot with appropriate pacing and arcs, I highly recommend you plunge on ahead. But if you do even minimal planning, you should be able to go back and make annotations or important changes without interrupting your flow.
Make what changes you need to have the story make sense, write short notes for everything else, and then get writing a new scene. Good luck!
(0)More posts by @Jennifer354
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © selfpublishingguru.com2024 All Rights reserved.