Seven Fold Editing.
I’m totally pathetic and lame. It’s been three years since I finished the first draft. The Seven Fold editing process is now under way. When I finished I was so excited and pumped that I’d finished the first draft that I told myself I’ll just take a bit of time off to let it compost while I get ready to edit. It’s now completely dirt, I even found bits of coal it’s been sitting there so long.
Today I’m half way through reading it with Ava my eleven year old. I keep asking her if she likes what we’ve been reading. She says she is enjoying it which is pretty cool, but I still wonder if she’s just saying that because she’s my daughter. I make the same kind of comment to her about her hair when she’s getting ready for school in the morning. What is the most shocking to myself is that I like it more than I thought I would.
Where I believe i’m different than many writers is that I write mostly story and dialogue. What I mean by this is that I write very little scene setting description. It’s something that I need to get better at and few of my Hamline University professors told me that I needed to work on. Stephen King wrote, “your final second draft will be your first draft minus ten percent.” This is very true in the sense that when you are cranking out your story and plugging in the events, dialogue, and description it’s more than likely a bunch of crap. What you’ve written however; is very workable and needed crap that needs to be written down so that you can do your word smithing, and tighten it up by eliminating the redundant, and superfluous.
I need to edit much of what I have but I also need to add in more description then go back brush away the unnecessary wood shavings that clutter up my story until I have a nice solid draft. My Seven Fold editing process is still new to me and a work in progress. One thing that I’m having an issue with are all the new characters that my story has in it.
I’m thinking but not 100% sure, but I might make my first draft into two novels. As I’ve been reading I keep thinking, eh, maybe I need to add in another chapter here for better continuity, two here because I have no clue how we got to this chapter, even though I saw it a few years back in my little head as making total sense. It’s been kind of funny at times reading this out loud to Ava. I’ll stop and reread then look at her and try to explain that what I just read then she smiles at me trying to explain nonsense and we laugh. I read a paragraph the other day where I stated the same thing three times in seven sentences. It was probably one of those days where I was trying to write two thousand words in one day.
It’s good to be writing again, even if it’s just a blog post on my Seven Fold editing.
Check out the video: Seven Fold Chapter 1