Old Manuscript Revival: Day 1, Diving in for Successful Plot Surgery

Part one - (Old Manuscript Revival: Beginning the editing frenzy)

When I started my revision process this morning, I spent a good chunk of time staring at the giant stack of two hundred and something pages and felt shivers run down my spine as I waited for it to jump up and bite my hand off. I hadn't looked at the story in two years, and every page was in serious need of TLC. But, with a mug of herbal tea and red pen in hand, I set off into the smoldering abyss of first drafts.

I started out by digging an old notebook hat has all my notes in it from when I first wrote the manuscript out of the bottom of a cardboard box. After a quick flip through, I started on a fresh page and made a table that looked something like this:

Plot Problems |  How to Fix

___________________________

   

I listed out a good dozen and figured out solutions. I had to rework my main character - I altered her backstory slightly and changed both her age and race. 

The biggest problem I saw was the beginning. The problem was that I thought of new plot twists as I wrote, and because of this, the beginning was littered with segments that contradicted ideas established later on. The first three chapters were by far the worst, so I chopped them off and spent most of the day rewriting them. 

After that, the minor problems became a lot less frequent, so I went ahead and began a line edit, fixing the problems as they appeared. I was a novice when I wrote the manuscript, and it shows in every sentence. I tried to use humor to defuse the tension in emotionally charged scenes. If I were writing it now, I would let the feelings stew with some heavier prose before moving on to a new topic. Also, I wrote my main character extremely cocky and did not make her emotions believable, so now I have to hack away at useless paragraphs and adding in more of her inner monologue.  

I learned a lot from my more recent projects, especially through my publication process of EOA, so now I face the challenge of incorporating everything I learned into my old work. I already love the plot. Now I have to transform the writing into something I'm proud of.

Over and out.