Ive got a mini-door stop, now how do I revise it?
Congratulations. Now, put it in a drawer, and don’t look at it for a couple of months. You’re too close to it right now, and you’ll have a very hard time telling forest from trees. Also, yes, ask a friend etc. to be a reader. I’ve done this for several friends – most recently, a friend whose novels I’ve read in rough draft published one of the novels – I first read it almost three years ago, I think. I was also not the only draft-reader – my friend has been a writer for a couple of decades, and has several friends and a couple of writing groups from which to draw draft-readers. Having more than one perspective can be really valuable.
Congrats! That’s a huge accomplishment 🙂 But at any rate, what I find really useful in terms of editing is really, seriously, just forget about it for a bit. I don’t think you need a few months, necessarily, but take a week or two to veg out. Watch some mindless TV. Watch movies in a completely different genre from that in which you’re writing, that kinda thing. Come back to it two weeks later, and yes, do the find-replace-names thing suggested. Then sit down and read the novel as you would a normal book. Don’t focus on changing it, pretend you’ve picked up this promising looking piece at the local library and you now want to give it a shot. Read it from beginning to end in as little time as possible, and then think about the impressions. I find that after I finish a book I’m generally left with a sense of what I would’ve done were I in the writer’s position, in terms of structure/pacing/etc. This will be helpful for looking at the big picture for your story. And since you actually ar
I agree with everyone that you should let it wait a month or so. What I did: went back to it, redpenned a chapter, but then, rather than make changes in my existing file, I typed the whole chapter in again, revising as I went. I think it’s psychologically easier to redo a paragraph the way it really needs redoing if you’re going to have to type the thing again _anyway_, and the only question is whether you’re typing the bad version or the good version. Also, this way it feels more like writing (fun) and less like editing (not fun.) If you’re like me, you’re going to find out on that second read a month from now that there are some major structural changes you need to make. Your revision is probably going to involve thousands of words of new writing, and thousands of words cut loose from the first draft. Also, if you’re like me, you’re going to find that going through this whole process once is not enough. I did it twice; each version of the book was about 30% longer than the previous v
