Revisions

Continuing on with the discussion topic of the week, revisions for me are intense. They tend to take me a long time to complete, and it depends on my mood of if I'm up to working on them. As I've done it more, it's gotten easier, especially after having to go through all of the edits for Melody of Love. With that novel, I felt like I wanted to pull my hair out since it was so intimidating to go through and revise it. I much prefer writing some days, but there are the occasional days that I prefer to edit since I'm working with something already there as opposed to creating something. Editing and writing utilize different parts of the brain and it's interesting because I notice that once I get into the groove of one that doing the other is more challenging.

I usually print out the entire story and then read over the work again and do line edits as I go. With Melody of Love, I learned a way that helped me get through the novel fairly easily. I listened to it with the help of a text to speech program called ReadPlease. I know that people say reading your work outloud is helpful, and I've tried it, but I don't feel comfortable doing so. Listening to it, even though the voices can be rather metallic, was able to do something similar for me in catching the different sentence structure errors and so on.

I can be pretty nitpicky of my own work and sometimes I have trouble seeing the positive points in it, which is pretty much the time in which I give it over to my critique partners. Even with my own knowledge of the English language, I miss things, too.

So! Leave me a comment and tell me about things that help you with the revision process.