The fourth draft of the novel is off to a slow start. I did finally manage to read through the manuscript myself, which I always like to do after a break from it. I caught a few lines I want to change, but mostly what jumped out at me were the things that my trusted (wonderful, amazing) readers had already told me.
When I finished the third draft I sent it to 10 people. Two were swamped and opted to read the next draft as fresh eyes, and there were two couples who shared copies, so what came back were six versions of my story, each with a separate set of line notes as well as a collection of larger notes. Here’s a photo of them all lined up together. I love the subtle differences – the way one is all coffee stained and shuffled, and another looks just like it did when I sent it out, stacked perfectly with rubber-bands holding it. One came back out of order. Another without a title page. I think you could do a whole study on how people give feedback, but anyway, I digress.
This morning I sat down and compiled all the larger story notes into a bullet point list with 50 items on it. 50 items! These are the bigger questions I have to figure out, like how does Tallulah keep putting things in her truck and never take anything out? and is that guy really Latino? – he doesn’t seem Latino. I can’t believe there are 50 of them. Thankfully, a lot of them overlap. The cool thing is, they were all things I hadn’t noticed, which means I did my job well (that is, I made the story as good as I could make it, and fixed all the problems I was aware of, before sending it out for feedback).
The next step is to go through each manuscript and collect the line notes into one master document. This seems like a lot of work, but I don’t want to have to make six passes through for little things, and I don’t want to have to flip pages on six manuscripts while I’m editing, so my plan is to make one master and work from that.
So I definitely have my work cut out for me. Thankfully, I seem to have gotten a handle on my little “Breaking Bad” problem. We only watched one episode last week. Okay, two. But still, I had a lot more time for working on the novel, which felt really good.
Onward and upward!
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