The last few weeks have been spent editing my historical fantasy novel set in the Middle Ages: Hell has its Demons. At present I am half way through reading the first draft. I am not making too many edits at the moment, unless I spot a glaring typo. This is my first time editing a full novel length story, and I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. But I have found that the most valuable thing to do is to just remind myself of what happens in the novel, what I wrote, and to get an overview of the major things that need fixing. For instance I have realised that there are a number of inconsistencies in the middle of the book – chapters out of order etc. Also there are some characters I introduce early on that die away, so I need to make a decision about whether to keep them in and develop them further in the book, or to get rid of them completely, or at least minimize their importance.
I’m enjoying this phase of the process. It’s nice to read through what I have written again as a holistic exercise rather than just reading bits and pieces here and there to check what I should be writing next. The good thing (or perhaps the dangerous thing) is that I like what I have written so far!
My experiment with writing a novel from different first person perspectives – see the Vulture posts, lead me to realize that it would be a lot of work to do this for Hell has its Demons, and I think not necessary either. My reread so far leads me to believe that the three different third person POVs will work quite well. First person POV writing gives fiction a completely different flavour, especially over an extended piece such as a novel, but I hadn’t appreciated that fully until I started writing the Vulture as an experiment. Who knows maybe I’ll take the experiment further at some point in the future, but I know it definitely has helped inform my writing of Hell has its Demons.
Related articles
- Writing Plans: Jake Savage Adventures and Hell has its Demons (marklord.info)
- The Next Step: Editing (silverpens.wordpress.com)
- A New Year’s Resolution to Edit the Right Way (newauthors.wordpress.com)
- Do Decent Editing Services Exist? (diamondpublicationz.wordpress.com)
- Why is starting your novel a problem? (natashamcneely.wordpress.com)
Mark:
My novel has been through numerous edits and changed from multiple pov 3rd person to limited pov 3rd person. I’ve also struggled from bringing an epic series first book word count of 175k down to (where it stands right now) 158K. I’m doing one last breeze through to try and cut even more and then it’s done. It’s been years in the making with a half finished sequel waiting in the wings. In all this time, I’ve found several other first-time novelists in the historical genre to work with as a collective critique of our work. We work together to make our writing stronger and it helps fine tune and see the weaknesses in our writing as well. It’s been a beneficial experience.
I found your blog via Alternate History. I’m in the process of building my own but I hope be a regular visitor of yours. BTW my novel is set at the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Good luck with your novel and your blog. Perhaps we could co-operate on critiques as well? I have used sites such as Critters etc for short story critiques in the past, but I’m not sure they work that well for novels.
Thanks. Sure, I would be interested in co-operating. I’d like to learn more about the alternate history genre. Can you contact me via email? Also, I left a question for you on the Alternate History site.