Words About Writing

Somehow, for this book - which I imported into Scrivener into a basic novel format - Scrivener is not functioning as well as the one I wrote in the Nanowrimo novel configuration on Scrivener. My searches based on custom meta-data yielded no results ( this was a key way that I sorted my character arcs before leaving my Nano draft ) and the cork board... well... Not actually a Scrivener problem, but a learning curve for me. The cork board only works within each folder. So for future books, I will not divide into sections until after the entire draft is done.That way I can go to the cork board and move things around before sorting them into groups! If you don't use Scrivener, sorry for all the software details. I'm still getting used to it myself. Last week, I did make some major changes to two minor characters. Not exactly combining them into one, I gave one character's dominant characteristic to the other, who was better-suited to it, frankly, and modified the first to

I finished the first revision a few days ago, and I don't think it's done. Clearly, the book isn't done, but I don't think the first revision is really done. I tackled the big things that jumped out at me in the reading, so I do have a 2nd draft. I once heard someone on the publishing end say not to send an editor anything earlier than a 5th draft, preferably 6th or 7th. Most online information I've seen says "three". I'm thinking that a lot of the "3 draft" people must combine revisions. My second draft is ready for me to go through it for more big stuff. I'm not sure about the storyline. The story is told in the order everything happens, but I think the secondary plot might be better split up and told at various times instead of as it happened in the timeline of the primary plot. For my second draft, then, I plan to go to the corkboard (in Scrivener) and play around with the order. See what sticks best. After I get that where I