Post-mortem: editing for NaNoWriMo
I mentioned a few times that rather than write a brand-new novel this year, I had decided to edit my NaNo from last year (a scifi novel that was about 100k words and had some serious structural issues). My reasoning was that NaNo is a tool to push you to do something you would otherwise put off. I don't have that problem so much with writing novels nowadays, but I absolutely have it with editing them later. I find any number of reasons to put it off or just not do it at all, the main one being that classic destroyer of willingness to work, "this is worthless and I shouldn't waste the time." And hey, that looks familiar. Isn't that the standard excuse that NaNo helps you blaze through? So I decided to go for it.
How did it go? Reasonably well. I spent the first week and a half or so reading through the whole novel, taking high-level notes, making a big old spreadsheet with the scenes, characters, places, events, etc. I tried to pick out what the underlying theme of it all was, to help guide me in what needed to stay or go, or what to emphasize. I tried to determine what the central spine of the novel was, the main plot around which the rest needed to revolve, for the same reasons. And I was surprised to find that the whole thing felt... salvageable. Substantial rewriting will be needed in the final third of the book, but besides that a great deal of it was going to be usable.
I spent the final two and a half weeks editing individual scenes while trying to keep the big picture in mind. Sometimes that meant just immediately deleting a scene. Sometimes it meant moving it. Sometimes it meant writing something brand new from scratch, filling a gap I had overlooked or just not wanted to fill at the time I wrote it. Sometimes it meant going through a scene, cleaning up incongruities and errors, removing notes to myself and fixing whatever the note was about, adding clues or foreshadowing or deleting stuff that was wrong: in short, what you'd think of as standard editing. These were the most fun.
I made it a little less than halfway through the book. Not bad given that the first week and a half I wasn't doing scene-by-scene edits, but it also means I haven't reached the really problematic part of the book. So maybe my feelings will change when I get there. But for now, I feel like this experiment was a success. I got stuck into something I'd been putting off for a long time, I got past some of the hard parts (rereading, cataloguing everything, analyzing the high-level stuff and making tough decisions about it), and while some of the hard parts are in the future, writing from scratch is something I already know how to do. So as far as that goes: fuck yeah.
Was this/is this a good use of NaNo? Yes and no. Yes for the reasons mentioned above: NaNo is a great vehicle for overcoming procrastination caused by fear of failure or avoidance of hard work. No in that NaNo is obviously geared more towards writing. I chose 50 hours of editing as my goal because it's a round number, and because since I typically write at 1000 words/hr for NaNo, it would result in the same amount of effort, or at least time spent. That was fine, but it turns out (surprise!) that the wordcount goal keeps you honest. It is really, really tempting while working on edits to go browse gaf or whatever. When you're writing 50k, that break means your wordcount has stopped moving, and the only way to get it going again is to get back to writing. Editing doesn't work like that, unless you're carefully pausing your timer every time you tab out of the window.
In future years, I think I'll go back to the standard writing 50k. Partly because of the above, partly because I felt a little bit left out of the fun without excerpts to post or characters and plots to wrestle with and ask for help on, and partly because now I think I can do this again without the impetus of NaNo.
Where do I go from here? If you're curious, here's the plan for this novel:
-finish current round of edits (probably another month or two)
-full read-through, second quicker round of edits focusing on stuff like foreshadowing, closure, fulfilling promises, hooks, chapter placement, etc (maybe a few weeks?)
-submit to my critique group and get their feedback (two months--we meet every other week, and I'll submit the novel in four chunks of ~25k. We've found this amount works really well for us when critting novels.)
-sit on it for a month or two, depending on how I feel after going through the group (I can be a little thin-skinned when being critted, and usually need to wait a bit before going back and addressing crits.)
-another round of editing for crits (and now we're in territory where I don't know what the timing will be like)
-find a few willing beta readers and send it out to them along with guidance of the sort of comments I want
-further edits based on beta comments
-further beta rounds as/if necessary
-final polish
-start querying agents
Yes, I'd like to eventually publish this novel. This might not be the one I hit with. It's too early for me to know how good it will be after all's said and done. But you can't learn without trying, so I'm going to go through the process. And in the meantime, I'll be working on my WIP novel (currently ~2/3 through), Open Source Magic. I'd sort of like to have two in the pipeline at a given time, one in edits and one in first-draft writing. We'll see what happens next!
Proud of all the winners and hey to the people that didn't finish you atleast wrote something! That is an important step in itself.
