Remember the line edits from a month ago? I had done 714 edits, I needed to do 1,092 more?
Done! Well, 10% of them were skipped and relegated to revision status, e.g. ” What damn color is her damn dress? Did I pick blue stripes or brown plaid? P-I”
P-I stands for Post-its. The next phase is all about post-its. Every one of the 25 revisions has a post-it color assigned to it. There’s a post-it for every character, and there’s a rainbow for the main character’s development arc.
You know I’m all about the process.
3 responses to “Rewriting the Novel: Line Edit Update”
I’d be more interested in writing a novel if it came with post-its!
(I’m not interested in writing a novel. I suppose technically another novel, since I did NaNoWriMo, but… that doesn’t really count, since it’s pretty terrible and I’d be embarrassed to have anyone read it and therefore it is not functionally a novel.)
OMG, I live with a process person and he would be all over all those color-coded P-I. I would be so confused after the first 10 minutes or organizing them that I would wander off into living room to check the weather on-line. HOWEVER, congrats on getting through the bulk of your edits and creating such a colorful way of proceeding to the next step.
KC – The first draft is always shit. You should see how you feel after draft two.
Kate – I can see myself not taking the next step, because that’s what I do: I get sloppy at the finish. The again, I was just vacuuming the basement steps and realized out of nowhere I had a character inconsistency and I had to fix it that minute, post-it or no.