I'm taking part in Camp NaNoWriMo this month. My intention was to get back into writing which was once a big part of my identity but ended up abandoned over the years. I planned to work on a variety of different projects just for fun, starting with a romance fanfic oneshot that I expected to be around 8,000 words. It's currently 21,000 and not done. As I was writing though, I felt increasingly like this wasn't meant to be the main story but a subplot. The main story has now presented itself but it's a monster. I love it and it's potentially the best idea I've ever had, but it's taken a oneshot fanfic to a full-length original novel. My main concern is editing and how to write in a way that makes the editing process as painless as it can get. It's already going to be pretty painful because switching from fanfic to original in itself is a lot of work but I don't know how to add this new element of my story specifically. Do I write the romance subplot and the main story separately and figure out how to combine them in a rewrite? Do I worry about making sure timelines align at all or is that a problem for editing me too? I should add that this will be my first ever edit/rewrite as I'm a serial flake and have never completed anything this substantial. It looks like I may, for once, get there but now I want to make sure I don't make the next steps so difficult that it gets abandoned in editing. Thank you all for your advice!
Someone recommended "Self-Editing For Fiction Writers", which was about $3.50 on amazon. I bought it and read the thing cover to cover. My advice is to get it, study it, make all the modifications suggested in the book, and then see how things stand. That way you're not bogging someone (an editor) down with tons of upfront stuff. Just a suggestion.
Seconded. Best, simplest, most practical resource ever written. Period. I've had to buy extra copies as the old ones fall apart.
I belong to the "write first, edit later" school of writing fiction. That is not to say, write a first draft and expect an editor to fix it for you. I appreciate the book suggestion.
That's the main benefit of plotting. Scene level edits disappear. Or imagine if you discover an error at an even higher level, even worse! haha. You lose a lot of writing fixing it, and so many people leave the issue. It's just too disappointing admitting the scope of what needs to be done. Many times the story stays broken. Anyway, that's how you avoid those big edits. With smaller edits you're always going to be adjusting sentences. When I want to minimize edits, the best I can do with my work is to force myself to edit draft 2 very deeply. That way draft 3 doesn't need as much. The same for draft 4. Otherwise I tend to just read and make minor adjustments. That takes a lot of passes and can be exhausting. I don't know, if the story has impact it's not so bad. It's always interesting to me when I read a section for the twentieth time and it still pulls me in. At least I know what works. If you're trying to minimize edits though, I think the best you can do is frontload draft 2 revisions and be brutal with them. With subplots what you do is summarize each of them in a paragraph. Put them out on index cards and then lay them out in the main plot in such a way that you get a proper mix of scenes. You can adjust timing because certain scenes might have to come in order, but often you have a choice of when and where those scenes go. You're trying to build a rhythm with the scenes. Hmm . . . that's a strange thing for me to say. I'm musing here. I'm big on pushing shifting non-rhythms in the story. (The best writing has an absence of rhythm.) Rhythms exist in the phrase, sentence, paragraph, and up to the scene, but they are in broken patterns. Once you hit the level of scene, it becomes okay to build a regular rhythm. I guess I never really thought about that . . . The books call that scene-sequel structure. One scene pushes the story physically forward (the literally named "scene") and the next reflects upon it and builds to the next action (the "sequel"). That's the only point you get a regular A-B-A-B rhythm. Try doing that with sentences and see what kind of disaster appears! The low levels of a story have no detectable rhythm. Anyway, when you're mixing plot & subplots (the scene interleave), look at regular rhythms. If your main plot scene was high-action, for instance, a sub-plot scene should appear that's quieter. So you'll use the regular rhythm between scenes when placing subplots in proper order. The scenes accentuate each other.
This this this. The kind of editing you're talking about, the major bits anyway, could be solved with a little planning I think. This might be doable if you're planning to alternate between the two lines scene by scene. If you're going to have to splice the scenes together, I would highly recommend against it. I can't say you wouldn't pull it off, but it seems needlessly difficult. Splicing even a few paragraphs into a completed scene can be burdensome enough. Taking two complete scenes and shuffling the paragraphs like a deck of cards sounds like a nightmare to me. The places I could see this happening are anywhere the two plotlines cross. I'm just assuming they contain some of the same characters though. Timelines can be a big problem too logistically, making them line up in a way that creates a natural flow through the narrative when recombined might be very hard.
My general guide is write without fear, edit without mercy (and leave a long gap between them) In the writing phase don't think about editting, just get the story down, develop the characters and show the setting, if its not perfect oh well fix it in the self edit In the ediiting phase i first read it as a reader would, while looking for plot holes/character holes/inconsistencies then on the second pass i tighten up the language, look for duplicate words, look at the most effective way to say stuff that done it goes to the actual editor then i make another pass using her notes then i fix the spag and send it to the proof reader (some people have said i should spag earlier but i don't see the point in spagging something still being edited because I'm going to introduce more anyway) then i edit it for spag again with the proof reader notes then i read it through one last time, put it threough vellum, read the formatted copy on a kindle to make sure the formatting didnt fuq up, then i hit publish
