Have Printer, Will Revise

Whew! Bought a printer last week. I had already hand-written enough to knock almost 20 pages off the print job, but what a relief to be able to print out the bulk of my manuscript.

As of this morning, I have finished reading through the whole thing. The steps I am following for this first revision are:

  1. Write my original intention/goal for the first draft.
  2. Read the entire first draft (in a different format from how I entered it - handwritten and in print). Read it, stopping only for general, broad-stroke notes, not nitpicking.
  3. Write a synopsis of the story I just finished reading.
  4. Use the original intention, the notes, and the synopsis as a starting point for the second draft.

Personally, after writing the synopsis, I re-read it, then highlighted bits of the synopsis that I think could be bigger plot points. Things that I recalled as I wrote the synopsis, but that seemed downplayed in the actual manuscript.

Sidenote: The first step to this process that I followed seemed unnecessary to me, but I did it. Maybe it's because of my genre? I'm writing women's fiction. There's not really "an intention" to that. An author in my writers' group is always looking for the moral or meaning or purpose when we talk about our work, and it kind of drives me crazy. Can't a book be written just for entertainment's sake?

AHA! That may be key. My intention was not related to the plot. My intention was to write a light-hearted story about a pair of friends and the various directions their relationships take.

Maybe I just solved my own problem. And THAT is why I started this blog!

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