Hi Alyssa, thanks again for your perfect timing, lol. I have been editing again for the umpteenth time, and still changing a word or line here and there. I have been querying recently, but so far have received 4 rejections. I see every rejection as one step closer to a "yes." Good luck to all authors here, especially debut authors like myself. 😊❤
I'm on draft 3 and I just sent my novel to a writer friend after revising, for almost a year, what an agent requested. It felt good, and nerve-wracking, to send it to someone else in its entirety but here's to not being stuck in the pain of solo revising.
Oh Alyssa - I've been down this road so many times and fallen asleep on the side of that road so many times over. I have a completed novel, and one nearly complete that I am not in the process (now meaning the last three years!) revising. I honestly don't know what stops me from writing. I have been retired for four years now and in that time you would have thought I'd be further along.. Not sure what this mentality is called... I can say that writing has haunted me my entire life - always feeling like I should be further along, I should be doing it. I should be working at it with more serious effort, but I don't. Maybe you can do a video for those of us who have been writing for years and just procrastinating.
yeah and the mistake of revising your novel again and again and again - there has to be some point where u stop the brakes and actually seek out to publish it.
My story about refusing to go back to my story and begin to make it a book is likely a therapist's dream. This video has challenged me to begin the work that's still before me since I believe in the message of the book. I'll tell you that clicking on the link for the free worksheet sent me down a rabbit hole and I have yet to find the worksheet. Oh well, I'll do what I can. Thank you.
I am from Albania. I write horror and fantasy novels. These genres have been vastly ignored in our literature and I literally can't find anyone who is able to comprehend the audience that I am trying to reach. At best, they try to shape my stories by typical eastern European realism standards. At worst, one of the industry people straight told me that I am not able to write good novels and should just give up. I would have taken this quite literally if I didn't know that the horror genre isn't even translated here, let alone appreciated.
I finished the first draft of my novella. I wrote it by the seat of my pants and am chomping at the bit to get back to it after six weeks - which is up this Friday. Yay! I tend to be brutal with editing, and heavily into polishing. I'm one of those guys who will labor for hours about semicolon placement. Thanks for this video, Alyssa! I saved it and will no doubt watch it again. Great advice here! Wish me luck.
Great advice as always. I finished my editing process having completed my novel early May. I had 3 beta readers read it after Imdid a self edit round and then went with a developmental editor I knew from my critique group. I actually like this part of the writing process because each pass through you are making the vision of the story more real and vibrant. I have found reading the MS out loud (using my word processing software) the most helpful as well as using revision worksheets like yours (my critique group developed our own as a guide to give feedback on the group’s submissions) to pick out week spots that need to be addressed. Again great advice!
Hi Alyssa! Your video couldn't have come at a better time. I'm currently on draft 5 going into number 6 after 1 complete rewrite and a few rounds of revisions based on feedback from my critique group. I also recently have gotten an editorial feedback and realized it is nowhere near ready for query yet. The main issues seem to be my wordy/flowery style and the slow pacing in the beginning (the editor liked the povs and both the plot and characters yay!) I'm now taking a more methodical route and going for a writing course to fix my issues as at this stage, I feel completely blind to them. Your encouragement and advice gives me a huge boost to continue on this journey!
These are all terrific big picture tips, Alyssa. I’m working on revisions of the second draft of an 80K word thriller. I’m attending a local critique group this week for feedback on my first 10 pages. I also have six beta readers I’m sending my work-in-progress to one at a time after I take a week to do another pass and make revisions. I’m saving my most critical beta readers until I’ve had ample opportunity to polish the manuscript myself. Cutting it, removing unnecessary detail, looking for wording that doesn’t sound right, hunting for errors, and keeping an eye out for material I can improve are the areas I tend to focus on. Maybe this is just me but I change the ethnicity or look of my characters all the time, usually because I see an actor or someone with a RU-vid channel who I think is interesting.
I’m a professional scriptwriter who just completed my first horror novel. My first editing challenge is that the project has a unique structural concept - one entry per page - and so doesn’t fit into a traditional revision process. Where would I go to get someone of your calibre to put their eyes on a single page, and direct me from there? The heavy lifting is done, but I could still fumble it moving from here.
draft 3.5 got halfway though editing and decided i needed to change the order of events quite substantially, got to a tricky scene then got the flu and haven't touched it for about a week. will be sitting in front of the document until i make some progress tomorrow tough
I recommend six weeks to two to three months put aside. Write another book completely. Come back to thos one snd and it will be fresh to you again. I do this all the time. I get stuck I put it aside also. I let the characters show me what going happen next but i font write till they start screaming at me. Another tip isso easy. If you learning get feedback after each and every scene. Rework that scene. Then move on to the next one.
Steps 1 & 2: I do a kind of mini-version of these every time I shut down my computer for the night. All of the stuff that I wrote sort of percolates in my head as I think about what I'm going to write next. Then, when I go back to my novel the next day, I look over what I've written the last several days and revise stuff. This sometimes means going back to the beginning of my book to make changes there, too. I can't help it. It's like I'm back in my old writers critique group, and I'm looking at someone else's work (just no red pen -- lol). Plus, I had to make revisions to my writing based on the feedback that I received from the other members of the group, so I've grown used to it. Once I've made my revisions, I start writing new stuff. This is everyday. So I think I'll be okay making revisions based on what my future editor tells me. 👍
Hammering through my second draft. Still stuck on revising Chapter 1. Lol. I've had up to 3 chapters done for the revision, but as I adjust the first chapter again and again, I need to change stuff. >.< It's tedious, but interesting.
My Beta reader comments were mixed, some loved the story but not some of the scenes and lengthy descriptions of my MC getting to places. One, a retired FBI agent, really didn't like much. She's very critical of how I described FBI procedures but I've learned a lot from her. Another reader who has editied a science fiction book (not my genre) gave it mixed reviews. I have put the story away for about 2 weeks. I'm not discouraged as this is my first attempt at writing a novel. I'm retired and having fun behing creative after a long career of writing bureacratic reports!
Great video! I'm currently trying to find a critique partner - someone ideally who also has a thriller manuscript finished or close to it. I feel like there are so many videos on how to find a trustworthy critique partner, but it is actually a lot harder than I've been led to believe. Do you know of any organizations or people who do matchmaking for critique partners?
I'm still working on my first draft but look forward to hiring a professional like Alyssa once I complete it and my self-edits. I also think I will hire a sensitivity reader but do not know if I should do that before or after hiring the professional editor.
I suggest you do a 2nd draft on your own. Then, I suggest you "crit-edit" it to create a 3rd draft. This means you find a fellow writer to go through your 2nd draft and flag weaknesses in it. Then, with those flags in mind, write your 3rd draft. This is the one you send out to be copy edited.
Do as much as YOU can do yourself. You want to send your best possible draft to the editor. Editing is a learned skill, just like writing, so the more of it you do, the better you'll become at it. Your future projects will benefit from what you learn about your writing while editing your work.
