Reading parts of my own novel!

I’m going to break up this reflections bit into several parts, first being misconceptions I had going in, why it was giving me so much anxiety, how I overcame that, and where to go from here.

Misconceptions I had going in:

1. It’ll be easy to pick up editing.
2. Academic Editing/Revision is the same as Novel Editing/Revision

So, from being in university, obviously I’ve had to like… do a lot of editing and revision of term papers, thesis papers, etc. I knew the fundamentals from an academic and experiential point of view, so how hard could it possibly be to pick up editing in a novel or prose context? As it turns out: Yeah, those two are pretty different. Readability is far less important in academic writing. It’s still important of course, but really you are trying to most accurately get the point across that your paper is trying to make. Prose however, is very much concerned with readability, the reader experience, etc. Two different beasts.

Why did this make me so friggin ANXIOUS?!

1. I had no idea what I was doing.
2. No, seriously, I had no idea what I was doing.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I “thought” I knew what I was getting myself into, which kind of ties in to the misconceptions I had going in, but even once I’d broken that down… I just didn’t know what to do! I had had feedback on some of the initial chapters, which helped a ton, but I was missing knowledge and skills on how to deal with structural issues.

How did I overcome that? AVOIDING THE PROBLEM LIKE A BOSS!

Sounds like a joke, is a joke, but basically I decided to take a step back and “get a clue” or as some would say it “git gud”. I decided to switch over to just reading my own stuff, and go from there, basically getting comfortable with your own work. Yeah, apparently that isn’t limited to Twitch streamers or YouTubers watching back their own content. Who knew?

Where do we go from here:

1. Partitioning.
2. Scale down.
3. Practice.
4. Practice.
5. ???
6. Practice some more.

Basically, it’s a skill set that needs developing. What I’m going to do, is create separate documents for each chapter, and work on them one at a time. At the same time I’m keeping a master document of notes of things I want to add to it or make changes to as I go so that I have an idea of where to go after I’m done with individual chapters. After that, it all goes back into a second “master draft”, I give the whole thing another read, and then we repeat the process until we get something that is nice, clean and good to read. In the meantime… we just get more feedback. Feedback is good, even if it is feedback on a Draft #0.

I’m calling this project completed for a variety of reasons, but I learned a lot!

I DID IT!

So, for some context, the first two weeks of the project I sat in abject terror of getting started but I finally managed to at least complete the goals of Week 2 & 3.

I’ve started taking notes based on feedback, making very minor spelling corrections and taking notes for things I need to change.

It’s also made me realize that I will need to learn a new skill-set or two moving forward, which is good insight to have.

I’m not going to continue reading, but I think I might expand Week 4 to be a lot more reading now that I’ve begun, since getting started tends to be a Eiffeltower sized hurdle for me and everything else tends to come easy.