This Is What Editing Dragon Scales

looks like now...

· Writing

These pictures (the header picture, and this one) contrast wonderfully to illustrate how self-editing of my WIPs has changed over the years. I've gained a greater understanding of story structure and changed how I plot and plan my novels and that means, editing them is different, too.

The black and white header is a pic of my very first finished MS, Dragon's Leap. To those of you who read it, thank you. I still cringe. Someday I'll come back to it and put it through the process I have now and get it sorted out properly. But the header picture shows how I tackled editing -- lots of on-the-page marks, comments, very little big-picture/story structure edits because the darn thing was so big. I made print-out after print-out and still felt like I didn't have a handle on it. My alpha reader and I finally wrangled it into shape, but it took 16 drafts to get it to a readable form. I eventually boxed of two (2) copy paper boxes full of print-outs and edits. I'm glad I did it, saw it through to the very end, but I never want to go back to writing like that, ever again.

Now, with beat sheets, I've learned to plot / structure the story ahead of time, and work out a lot of the kinks before I draft. Then when I write, I have a wonderful alpha reader who spreadsheets the book, scene by scene. It's the best way we've come up with to keep track of what each scene's purpose is, does it accomplish it, and whether it adds to the end goal of the external plot or the character's inner emotional drama. If not, I'm absolutely brutal -- it gets cut.

In the newer picture, on the left is a print-out of the MS draft of Dragon Scales that I'm working with. This happens to be v2, and this process will produce a v3. (I'm on V4a and will be making edits to that with beta reader feedback in the coming weeks). In the middle is a timeline of the story events. On the right is the spreadsheet created by my alpha reader. I use the spreadsheet, which includes page numbers, to go over each and every scene my alpha reader makes a note of, with the goal of making sure everything keeps the story going forward.

This is for Dragon Scales (DS), a middle grade MS. My wonderful alpha reader is currently devising a spreadsheet for my adult murder mystery, Babytime on the Border: A Ginger French Mystery, and already he's said it's much more complex than DS and will need many more fields to analyze scenes. There's four working plots in Babytime, compared to two in DS, and that's one of the ways MG is so very different from adult literature.

Dragon Scales isn't quite there yet, but it's getting much closer, much more quickly than Dragon's Leap did. I'm finding it's so much easiear to see what to cut, where. And when structural changes need to be made, they're readily apparent. For instance, I had to rewrite / restructure the opening of DS. My alpha reader spotted it in a way I just can't while my head's in the MS, drafting, and that's what the spreadsheet does -- pulls me out and enables me to see what I've written, objectively, from a distance. It helps that I've done this with multiple mentor texts by this point, as well, and I continue to do so when I read something I love. I figure out what I loved about it, from a meta-distance, not a reader's distance. I'm getting better at doing this for critique partners, as well.

Dragon Scales is still a WIP, and this editing process is still evolving. But I feel Babytime is going to go even more quickly, once I get to revising it.

My goal for the end of 2021 is to start drafting another MG, The Defenders of Jackalope Loop, and finish by early 2022 to be able to edit it, get feedback and submit it to mentor contests in 2022.

What process have you developed to edit your WIPs or MSs? And how has it evolved, as you've continued writing? I'd love to hear from you in the comments!