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R.M. Archer replied to the topic So… What now? in the forum New Wessex Writing Discussions 7 years, 6 months ago
I read through the whole thing (ideally in one sitting, but probably not if you have a super long project) and comment on all the things I spot that are wrong with it. Plot holes, wording that doesn’t work, stilted dialogue, whatever, I just comment on all of it. (I’ll also fix grammatical mistakes as I find them.) It’s probably not a great idea to focus on wording in only the second draft, so I’m not sure I’d recommend adopting that particular aspect of my process. (I’m something of a grammar Nazi, so it bugs me personally. XD) But going through and just picking everything out in one go works really well, so you can see the big picture. Then I generally go through it chapter by chapter and deal with the issues I found and sometimes/often find things I missed. You can also look at how the chapter is structured and what purpose it serves.
In my third draft I split it into scenes and went over the purpose of each one and tried to solidify the characters’ goals in each scene and draw them out (that’s also when I worked at fixing my problem of too little description), but you could do that in the second draft too since it’s another foundational thing.
@cassandraia‘s method of totally rewriting could also work, though. I did that for a different project and… I won’t say it worked, because the whole story was just a disaster and I needed to learn more, but I think the method/process would have worked just fine if I’d had enough writing knowledge to do it well.
And yes, definitely keep a copy of your first draft. 🙂












