Now that NaNoWriMo has been over for about two weeks and most of the novel writing withdrawal has faded away, I can think more clearly about what I want to do with this manuscript I now have on my hand. While I cannot foresee a sufficiently uninhibited moment in which I decide to let anyone read it in its entirety, I should still like to produce a properly edited version of it, just as a matter of personal satisfaction and literary closure. This is something I never managed to do with my first novel, despite attempting it on three separate occasions – I speak from personal experience when I say that 200,000-word drafts are incredibly unwieldy creatures.
The plan is to begin taking the proverbial red pen to my novel at the start of the new year, but how to actually go about editing? Revising academic writing is fairly straightforward because there are rather rigid norms of style and structure that should be observed, but what about this creative mumbo jumbo, when the goal is not to advance an argument but merely to tell a story in as pleasing a manner as possible? I’ve been collecting some advice regarding this very question, ranging from this Lifehacker post to NaNoWriMo’s own “I Wrote a Novel, Now What?” page, and the most useful thing I found is from the latter:
The first step toward a productive revision is to read your manuscript as a reader not an editor. Just curl up and read it, and make two lists. One is the parts that don’t work — a character so dull you can barely remember his name, parts you were tempted to skip (or sleep through!) The second list is for things you did like, because that’s important, too. At the end, if that first list looks too daunting, read the second and remind yourself of all the parts that worked — all the great stuff that deserves an equally great novel.
You would think that this is self-evident, but it struck me as so revelatory that, when I came across it, I grabbed my official writing notebook, drew a line down the middle of one page, and dived straight into my manuscript, taking notes on things that pleased me (“p. 22: the contrast in personalities when A&I first meet”) and things that caused me to wrinkle my nose in writerly disgust (“p. 19: A being lovey-dovey w/ his wife – he’s supposed to be emotionally repressed!”). I did manage to stop myself after about fifty pages or so, but I already have an idea of the more drastic rewrites and addition of new scenes that I will need to undertake. Best to get the big picture stuff sorted out before I tackle the dangling modifiers, awkward syntax, and repetitive diction that writing a novel in all of one month undoubtedly produced.
As a bit of a postscript, I did want to share a small mix that I put together while I was NaNo-ing. Music has always been instrumental (pun intended, certainly) in creating the right atmosphere for writing, and that was absolutely the case for this novel, as my two protagonists are both musicians and classical music might as well have been the third. Therefore, one writing playlist consisted of all of the pieces that I referenced in the manuscript or somehow corresponded to events in the story; the other was an ever-evolving musical distillation of the relationship between the aforementioned characters that lay at the heart of the novel. After much tinkering, this is what I’ve got.
the isabelle and anselm ep
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