First Draft Edits and Chinese Take-out

I picked up my Chinese take-out order and, when I got home, discovered there were seven fortune cookies included. So, are they being generous, or… did I just buy enough food for SEVEN PEOPLE?

Don’t judge. I’m editing.

That’s right. It’s time to take that big sloppy 70,000-word mess of a first draft (written during last year’s National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo) and turn it into something resembling a story. During the first round, I look for slow passages, repeated information or dragging backstory.

During that first edit, I’m checking that everything is in the right place, deciding where to put the chapter breaks and checking for or writing a hook at the end of each one.

This is usually slow going as the pages that took a week to write took only a day to read. Noticeable problems in timeline appear.

“How many workdays are there in this five-day work week? Six? That’s not good.”

The timeline is always a bugaboo for me. But at this point I can no longer sacrifice details for speed, and I begin checking and recording the time, date, location, at a one sentence description of plot for every scene. I’m currently using a novel database that I created in Airtable for this part of the process.

“Why do the roommates only talk in the apartment kitchen? Don’t they have any social life?”

It’s time to set some scenes elsewhere. Send them for a drive. Maybe while they’re gone, they can pick up enough Chinese take-out food for seven people!