A Month of Editing

This month, a group of my writing friends and I are editing.  We call it JaNoEdiMo, short for January Novel Editing Month.  :) And on January first, I began the adventure of editing my first novel.  All this month, as I am learning, I am going to post about editing.  I don't believe that there is a right or wrong way to edit, so if your editing process is different, don't think that you have to change it to do it the way I do it.  And today, I am talking about the first two steps I took!

Step One - Reading Over the Rough Draft

This can be a painful part of the process...very painful.  I saw some pretty ugly, choppy, corny, and all out ridiculous stuff.  Especially in my first chapter.  As I read I was cringing and asking myself how I could have written that in the first place.  But, I had to tell myself it is for the good of my novel and keep going.  I did not take notes while doing this.  I did mental note a couple of things, but that is about it.

Step Two - Breaking the Rough Draft into Scenes

Now that I am actually changing stuff, I realize that I didn't really need to do this step.  However, it does make it seem less daunting when I am rewriting and changing.  I colored each scene a different color to make it pretty.  :). I wanted to put a picture in, but I would not get all of the pages to go really small.  :(