I took the first draft of my novella and broke it into chapters, then used Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet to find all the important story points and found out where they should be in the story according to chapter for the structure to be right. You can read about how I did this in my last blog post right below this one. So now I have all the elements of the story in the right places and it flows how it should. The story structure is nailed down.
I've been rereading this second draft and am finding that while things are in the right place, there are still many places that need some more cleaning up. So I'm going to do one more draft before I send my manuscript off to beta readers. This last draft won't involve any story revision, but revising the prose down to the paragraphs and sentences to make the writing clearer. So for this novella I thought it would be fun to make a simple list of my process to get it ready for sharing with other eyeballs:
| Revision Process: Write the First Draft Give it time to cool so I could distance myself from it Reread the story Organize it into chapters Write a new outline based on these chapters (A brief paragraph per chapter) Use Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet find to all the story points Place these story points into the correct chapters Revise Outline Revise/Rewrite manuscript into a Second Draft so the story structure is right Reread the story and realize there are still spots of sloppy writing Revise the manuscript into a Third Draft so the prose is clean and concise Read the story again to make sure it's ready for Beta Readers |
What's your process once you have that first draft done? I'd love to hear about it! Leave a comment. Thanks for stopping by.
No comments:
Post a Comment