How I'm Fixing the Bad Parts

There was a lot happening in the news yesterday, so I barely got started on fixing the boring passages in my novel, but for anyone struggling with this, here's how I'm going about it:

I have several pages devoted to my main character's experiences on her club tour in Texas, and deleting them is out of the question; this is where she falls in love with her lead guitarist. The trouble with the entire chapter is that it's dull. I had suspicions that it was, but the audio readback cemented it, and it was clear it needed a rewrite.

Going into the manuscript and working from there would only confuse me. And it really allows for cosmetic changes only, while the entire gist of it remains the same. Thus, I copied the entire chapter and pasted it into a new document.

Now my revisions start at the end of that new doc. I can either copy the original iteration paragraph by paragraph and paste each, one at a time, at the end of the doc if they only need minor changes, or I can refresh my memory by reading a section and then rewriting it from scratch. 

For example, the first paragraph shows her meeting her three musicians for the first time, one of whom will eventually play a major role in the story. First draft writing is just getting the idea down and maybe tidying up the sentences. Sometimes that works out fine, or in my case it's awful. Because I had to conjure up three different personalities for these guys, I wrote it more as a laundry list. 

I reread that first paragraph and knew what I needed to do to make it better, so at the bottom of the doc I rewrote that paragraph to emphasize the "main guy" and to also reflect her trepidation about working and traveling with three complete strangers. (In other words, I showed her feelings, and not just a recipe card.) I also threw in a bit of dialogue to better showcase the guys' personalities. 

Once I was satisfied with the rewrite, I went back up to the top of the document and deleted the original passage.

Doing this section by section and deleting each original part as I go, I'll eventually have a whole new, much improved chapter that I can paste back into the manuscript.

I don't want to ditch a lot of good scenes; I just want to write them better, and this method gives me a roadmap and stops me from getting confused and losing my place.

The other advantage to working from a new document is that I don't run the risk of accidentally deleting something from the original manuscript I hadn't intended to delete.

The Texas scenes are only the beginning, and it'll take time to work through. I have a whole other section requiring rewrites, too. Since I didn't want to get back into writing mode to begin with, tackling small sections when time allows doesn't feel so overwhelming. 

Every writer works differently. If you're some kind of first draft genius, none of this will apply to you. If, like me, every editing video you've watched is pointless, you'll need to come up with your own editing method.

This one works for me.