Physical Editing

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starrykitten

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Hi!

I want to hear from anyone who has some sort of physical/spatial editing process. Do you put pages all over the floor and rearrange them? Cut up stories into lines? Put everything on the wall and work on it? Color-code anything?

I want a more tactile editing process, but I'm still experimenting to find the best one for me.

Thanks!
 

Red-Green

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I start with a print out of the MS and several different kinds of post-its, plus some highlighters and pens and pencils. This way I can color-code thematic stuff, add marginalia on color-coded post-its. That way, if in one scene I have a detail that I want to move from another scene, I can annotate that on a post-it flag and later when I get to the scene where the detail is, I flag that, too. It's like literary Garanimals. It pretty much looks like chaos, but it works for me.
 

ishtar'sgate

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On the floor? Never! I have this horrifying visual of my big happy dog galloping into the room and writhing around on my manuscript.
I make a hard copy and do my first edit in red pen. If the changes are small then I make them on the page. If the changes are large then I assign the spot a number and do revisions in longhand on a correspondingly numbered page.
 

JoNightshade

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I've done a few different things in the past, depending on what it is I wanted to accomplish.

1. 3x5 cards. I write a two-sentence summary of every scene in the book, one scene per card. The first sentence is the ACTION, while the second sentence is the emotional/character progress or whatever you want to call it. (Example: "Judy jumps out the window and breaks her leg. Judy thinks Joe won't love her anymore.") I then lay them all out on the floor and see how things look visually. Where's the climax? Do the points flow together or feel disjointed? Is there anything I can take out? Anything missing? I do this for every book, usually several different times at different points in the process. It helps when I've hit a mental wall.

2. Papers tacked to the wall. This is what happens when I have two competing versions of a story and I need to resolve them. (IE, I wrote 10K and then REwrote the same 10K, changing plot elements, but then I discover there are a lot of things about the first version I like better and want to incorporate.) I tack both versions next to each other on the wall, cutting up as necessary for chronological continuity, and then I start highlighting and crossing out things. In my experience, this is pretty crazy-making and didn't really get me anywhere.

3. Print out entire manuscript and rearrange on floor. For my current WIP, I wrote the whole first draft with no chapter breaks - just straight through. So I had to go back and make chapters. So I laid everything out on the living room carpet so I could see how big each chapter was compared to all the others, where the natural breaks were, etc. This worked quite well.

4. Printed out entire manuscript and put in three-ring binder. This was so I could take parts out, mark on them, put them back, etc. It's sitting on a shelf, never opened. Actually this is not the fault of the format - it was too early to do that sort of edit.

5. Printed out entire manuscript, had it bound BACKWARDS at Kinkos. (So that when you open the first page, page 1 is on the left, and the facing page is blank.) This was for my last WIP, and the intent was to make all the notes of changes on the right-hand blank pages. Actually it worked well.

If I think of anything else I will post. :)
 

mrockwell

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On the floor? Never! I have this horrifying visual of my big happy dog galloping into the room and writhing around on my manuscript.
I make a hard copy and do my first edit in red pen. If the changes are small then I make them on the page. If the changes are large then I assign the spot a number and do revisions in longhand on a correspondingly numbered page.

This is pretty much my process, too (except I have to worry about a big happy toddler, not a big happy dog, heh).

-- Marcy
 

Nymtoc

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I do everything on the computer. I never print anything out until I need a manuscript, or a portion of a manuscript, to show to someone. (I back up everything both internally and externally, so there's no way I'm going to lose my work if the computer explodes.)

I use color coding to remind myself that I want to change a passage or delete it or move it or whatever. I just change the color of the type, and the passage jumps out at me when I look at the ms. Also, I sometimes work with two or three copies of the same material, to try out different ways of arranging things.

Paper all over the floor? O noooo, Mr. Bill!

:D
 

Darzian

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I can't even begin to imagine manual sorting. I have to do that enough times with my wardrobe.
 
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