Editing and Dreaming

I’ve been starting the editing process and have really been enjoying it! Much to my surprise. I think I was dreading this part of the process and unsure of how to approach it really. I had done some initial research into how to format a book a while back and my partner had mentioned that there's software that will help you keep track of characters and such. I of course, immediately hated this concept and didn’t want to even look at it as an option. I’m more of a paper and pen kind of gal. My idea was to print it out and work on it the way I’ve edited anything else in the past - which is to spread it all out on the floor around me and go to work. Which, I had actually been looking forward to in a way. Less the full process, but more the feeling of flow I can get in when working that way. And something I haven’t done in many years.

I started hitting snags in my plan though basically right away. I’ve relocated recently and had limited paper when I first printed my draft out and then realized I forgot to add page numbers to it (!) and quickly got overwhelmed by how hard it was going to be to not only physically keep track of everything and then to rearrange it all, but also mentally. This was like 200 pages longer than anything else I had ever edited before. And this was complicated by the fact that this is a very rough first draft, where there is still a lot of major re-writing and plot fixes, cohesiveness to fix, etc.. So I decided to actually look into what software was out there and see what the deal was. After some research, it seemed like - for PC at least - Scrivener for editing and then Atticus for formatting would be the right fit for me. At first, Scrivener didn’t make a lot of sense to me, like I couldn’t tell why I would need or want something different than Word or Google docs. It also sounded like it had a learning curve, which I wasn’t sure if I wanted to invest the time into either. Mostly because I thought it might feel like having to relearn a muscle memory instead of a new skill, which I wasn’t sure if I had capacity for. My partner had also suggested watching some YouTube tutorials of super users to see how they use the software as a way to accelerate the process and learn workflows from professional users. I’m pretty tech savvy, but also get frustrated with learning software for things that I can do easier on paper. Photoshop is a great example of this. I hate trying to do anything in there and this is compounded because I already know how to draw, paint, etc.. in physical mediums. (As an aside to solve this problem I’ve been using Canva which is much easier for me to understand how to do random digital things I need to do and involves like 85% less tears).

So I decided to download Scrivener, which has a 30 day trial, and test it out. My usual MO for this is to just poke at and try everything to see what happens, but it came with a written, semi-interactive, tutorial. Which I went through. It was kind of confusing to read the instructions the same way reading a makeup tutorial is more difficult than just watching someone put their makeup on. But I think they did a good job and it was an interesting format. Plus you’d assume most writers won’t mind reading! I did watch a couple videos from users on the software after - which really helped tie it together for me and highlighted a couple features I didn’t really understand how to use effectively and taught me some creative ways to use other features that I hadn’t thought of. So between all that, plus spending a half dozen tries importing my Word doc properly, I’d say it took me a couple solid hours to understand how to use it and get started. From there it was a much shorter time to get the settings and themes I wanted right. The biggest frustration was honestly trying to get the font, color, size, etc.. standard across the entire doc. Scrivener is just so different from a regular Word processor and I had been working on this draft for so long that it had already gone through multiple programs and formats, that getting it uniform was much more complicated than I thought.

Once I finally got started though, I started really enjoying how organized I could be and how much easier I could make it on myself to keep everything straight and to tie up all the loose ends I knew would be floating around. I’m currently in the process of mostly preparing for actual content editing by splitting up the draft into ‘scenes’, tagging characters and locations and such, making notes and spellchecking. I’m also marking off dialog sections for style formatting later and pulling out passages that describe characters or locations into their own sheets so that I can have a cohesive vision of what I wrote and to clean up later if needed.

It’s been a fun process actually! Which is a huge relief. I was worried I would get into this part and hate it, or get overwhelmed and then never actually finish the editing process. So I’m excited that I found a way to do this work that is enjoyable and fun to me. I’m looking forward to finishing this very first pass and then to move to flushing out the empty bits, fixing some of the overall plot structure to match my vision and then refining from there. I still think I will re-print it to work on it by hand, but I think now I’ll do that much closer to the end of the process once it feels more like a book I’m reading than something I’m making huge structural changes to.

It’s cool to see it coming together like this and a neat little surprise in this process for me. It feels like making a dream a bit more of a reality - and I’m feeling good that I invested the time into setting myself up for success in the long term, rather than pushing through a difficult process to prove a point to myself. Progress!