Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 3199607" data-attributes="member: 5171">Yes and no and yes. I went to a novel workshop (in which we had to have a completed novel) with Dean Wesley Smith, who has published about 80 novels (under his name and others). He prefaced all of his critique comments with something roughly like this:"I'm going to give you a critique. In a very few cases, these critiques will be helpful -- a few small changes you can make to give your novel a much better chance of being published. In most of the cases, though, regardless of what I say, you should just send out what you have, assuming it's proofread and polished to the best of your ability. A lot of these structural changes I'm suggesting would help you when writing a different novel, but you would essentially be rewriting your existing novel from the ground up to make them in this novel, and there's a good chance that making those big structural changes in order to fix the flaw I've pointed out is going to cause you to strip all the life out of your novel -- all the freshness that actually made it good despite the flaws I'm pointing out."So for most of you, my advice is to take my critique as a guide for what to do next time. Most of these novels are as good as novels that have been published, even with the flaws I'm describing."There were a few cases where he made specific suggestions, and a few cases where he flat-out said, "Throw this novel out," but for most of us, the above held true.That advice is why, although I'm pretty good at rewriting, I still shy away from the deliberate "I'm writing a lousy first draft!" mentality. Subsequent drafts are more polished and fix a lot of issues, but if I have to do too much complete rewriting (rather than revising lines here and there but leaving scenes mostly where they are), I feel like I'm losing the coolness that was the first draft -- the freshness, the initial joy of writing, whatever.Again again again -- not an argument against revising and editing. I'm revising my novel all over the place right now. I guess it is, for me, the difference between honing a blade and reforging a blade from the same materials. (Bear in mind: not a smith.) I'm all in favor of honing, but trying to reforge from the same materials often results in me having something that is cleaner but, ultimately, weaker. The first forging is where the magic happens.It's all a question of how much of your original draft you can use.That sounds like an excellent plan. I am hugely in favor of outlining in detail. I've gotten a lot of my fastest and strongest writing done when I've got it all the way down to:Ch. 161. B & I Fight2. L & R enter ballroom, L moves on, R goes to H3. B & I Fight, finish4. T, D, K, & G meet MThat might be more detail than some people want, but it cuts a lot of the "Hey, what should I write next?" dead-time away. And if I suddenly realize that the outline is wrong and have to write something else... well, I'm still taking less time than if I had to figure out from scratch what came next.</blockquote>

Verification