Well in my case, it’s really a bit of both. I think I outlined well enough that I don’t have massive issues to work on, but scenes will be changed and disappearing character’s will be fixed, but much of everything else is polishing. Sure, I’ve found my fair share of spelling and grammatical errors, and I am having to fix sections that repeat scenes or have other conflicting information, but progress is good and I can see the end is still a ways down the road, but definitely approaching.
As with most of my novel writing journey, I don’t really know if my techniques are the best, but they appear to work for me. I did a read of my novel with a red pen on hand, and made notes on parts that didn’t make sense, or where facts changed from a previous chapter. The red ink did flow for spelling errors as well, but thanks to my Scrivener’s program spell checker, it wasn’t too awful. My lovely wife was kind enough to have gone through a read of my first draft as well and made her own notes of questions, observations and spelling errors so that helped a lot too. Thankfully she liked the novel as well, but she is a little biased so my ego’s not swelling up too big. Still wonderful to me to have satisfied my first reader, particularly this one.
So my method now is to take my first draft novel with red pen marked edits and do the physical rewrite in my Scrivener program. It’s a little disjointed a process though as I do a quick look at the papers with edit notes, then go at it in Scrivener, but I inevitably get ahead of my marked papers in the program itself. Then I go back to make sure I didn’t miss any of my previously marked issues. Thankfully, I haven’t found many issues I didn’t catch a second time, but I did find just a few that I didn’t catch on the first. Guess that’s really part of the process, but I hope it ends up in a well edited novel with as few mistakes as I can possibly manage.
Considering that people will be paying for my humble little novel, I think I owe it to them to do the best I can to make it as readable as possible, as well as what I hope will be an entertaining story. I’ve been looking into hiring a professional proofreader for a final check, but the costs can be in the $1,000 level and up, so I’ll probably not go that route because that’s a pretty big investment to make for a first novel.
I think it would pain me very much to read reviews that indicated they found a lot of errors in the words I’d put down on paper. I don’t want to go the analysis paralysis route either, though, so at some point soon, I’ll be making my last skim over everything and making the final push to get it published. In my day job position, this will entail my “coming out” with my novelist aspirations as I’m required to notify my employer of any outside business activity, and selling books, no matter how few (or hopefully many) fits into this definition.
So after all this time, working on this first novel of mine, I’m getting very close to publishing it on Kindle and other platforms. I’m hoping the rest of the rewrite goes well, and I get closer to the ultimate goal. Partly because I want to see “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” live, and that won’t happen until it’s published. Another part, though, wants to finish this story, so I can move on to the next one. Almost there.
Novel: Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.
1st Draft Rewrite Progress: Up to Page 72 of 351 (double space proof copy print)