Wednesday, October 12, 2011

WIP Wednesday

First off - Happy Birthday to my awesome stepson!! He's 21 today, which is blowing my mind. When I married his father he was this adorable freckle-faced little 10 year old :) Now he towers above all of us and has turned into a wonderful young man. :)

Now....in writing news - things went wonky LOL I'm rewriting a novel I wrote a few years ago (as I've told you before). Revisions have been going very well. Then I realized that while they were going well for the OLD storyline, I was getting way off track for the NEW storyline. Not that anything was horrible, and I'd added quite a few new tidbits. But I was 100 pages in and the real crux of the new stuff hadn't really started yet and was bogged down in all this stuff that, while I liked it and it worked well for the other story, was pretty irrelevant to the new story.

I always block out my scenes on post its and put them up on my cork board during revisions, so I can see what I have and more easily determine what needs to change. But for this problem, those didn't really help.

So...I typed up a little mini synopsis for each chapter, printed it out, put it on my cork board, and started rearranging and cutting. It was kind of fun. I had my tape, scissors, red pen, and push pins all laid out. I cut one entire chapter and took another one, cut a few bits out of it and taped them into the synopsi (?) for 2 other chapters...and got rid of the rest of that one. Then I moved a few chapters around so their content fit the flow of the story better.

And then I took all that, made a new little synopsis for each chapter on a post it (one for each chapter), put those on my main cork board, opened my files and went to town. It probably sounds more complicated than it was LOL But it worked great! I'm a very visual and hands-on person. If I can see it and DO it (as opposed to just reading it) I can work things out much quicker.

So, I am now well on my way to getting this puppy where it needs to be :)

Do you have any special little tricks like this that help you when it comes to revisions?

5 comments:

Christine Fonseca said...

Being a plotter, I have an overall plot for the novel that I work from.

Patti said...

I scribble down notes on scrap pieces of paper then hope I can find them when I go back to revise. Not the best plan, I'll admit, but it seems to work.

Stephanie McGee said...

I make a detailed, scene-by-scene outline that I work off of for revisions. Really works great for me.

Congrats on making awesome progress on your revisions.

Mark said...

It's great that you're re-writing a previous WIP. I find that such work has led me to some of my better writing. Good luck:)

Jennifer said...

One thing I like to do with revisions is pull out chapters (or even individual scenes) and paste them in separate documents to work on them. It's less daunting that way.

Good luck! :)