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Thank you Raimey!

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This month, I’m reporting top tips to begin a second draft of a work in progress. I’ve learned the best advice is to settle my impatience and let the first draft sit to clear the canvas in my mind. My own first draft was completed back in March.  A reasonable amount of time has passed and I’ve since moved on to other projects.

So now that I’m ready to make revisions, I admit, I didn’t know where to start and I’m sharing tips from a great author, Marissa Meyer. She reflected over her process in draft two of Cressa. Please visit her post as she provides lovely details of her process.

Here goes her tips and a few simple reflections:

1. Print out your first draft.
   Make notes of plot holes, questions, characters who may have been left out for lengthy chapters and need to be added back to remind the reader they exist. Ask yourself, how can I make life worse? What challenges can I throw into these scenes to add tension or correct realism in dialogue? How can I be mean to my characters I may have delicately danced over in the first draft?
2. Import Draft One into Scrivener. Meyer used word to write her first draft. To begin her second draft, she imported everything into Scrivener. Have you tried it yet? I love it to pieces. Then use the synopsis note card and write two to three sentences to summarize each chapter.
3. Plan the revisions from your notes.
   Start with the big holes or changes you would like to see. Review the changes you note are not working and plot new scenes, brainstorm character changes, and ways to fix the holes. For me, I have a character who drops off the planet half way through the book, for good reasons, but not the right emotional reasons. Fixing her location will most definitely create new details and new scenes. Fixing her location and creating new scenes will further enhance one of the major themes in my story and was dropped in the first draft. I don’t want it dropped.
4. Revisit the plot structure. 
   Add the new scenes and revise old ones. Scrivener has a terrific cork board to drag and drop scenes. I love being able to move things around. I love Scrivener’s character and location templates. I may do some more research on specific locations I’ve picked in the book and add them to my notes.
5. Focus on the subplots.
   Marissa Meyer mentions the first draft is about the larger plot. She takes more time in the second draft to flush out the details in subplots. For instance, backgrounds and histories and why characters do what they do. The subplots lead to deeper themes and plots readers crave. Once I rewrite the location of one of my characters, I’ll have satisfied some deeper emotional subplots of sisters and strengths and weaknesses in families and how together we create balance and solve problems we can’t always do alone.

So this is my plan. I’m starting this week. Wish me luck in the next few months and if you have any other tips on second draft revisions and organization, I’d love to hear it.