In Which I Printed Wrong

I've recently come to a realization regarding my revision process and it is this:

I printed my novel incorrectly.

How can that be, you ask? Surely there's only one way to print something?

No. That is not true.

Let me 'splain.

So I originally printed off the whole novel as soon as I was done with the first draft. Mostly it was just so I could stash it somewhere where Twin hangs out so she could find it and be all surprised. But also I figured it would have to be line edited anyway, so it certainly couldn't hurt.

Also I don't think I could have scene blocked without having it printed off next to me. I mean, I guess I could have written out each scene on a colored post it note by reading each scene on the computer. But really, that sounds horrible.

Also I've learned that if I find someone even remotely irritating (and by remotely irritating I mean, just barely intolerable) then I don't do it.

And scene blocking off a computer screen strikes me as something that is irritating.

BUT, all those reasons as to why I wanted it printed off doesn't counter the problems I'm now running into.

1. - I added a few scenes. These scenes are obviously not in my printed version

2. - I created chapter breaks

3. - I rearranged some scenes.

All of this leaves me with a version of my novel, printed out, that doesn't match the organization of the current novel.

And this is something I find irritating. For example, when I wanted to line edit chapter one, well the third scene in chapter one was originally scene 8, so I have to page through the novel until I find it. It's not that big a deal, but still. Kind of a pain when you have 325 pages to page through.

But, all of this irritation has led me to understand the correct way, in the future, to print out a WIP.

No, it's not chapter by chapter (or at least for me it's not).

It's scene by scene.

That way, I can move the scenes around individually whenever I want and not have to worry about chapters changing.

So when I'm done with this first set of line edits, I'm going to add page breaks not just after each chapter, but after each scene, to prevent any future irritation (and don't worry, it will be printed on the back of the current version. I don't want to waste paper)

Does this make sense? Am I crazy?

In Which I Interrupt My Revision

Well lookee lookee. It's Monday again. How great. I need like 6 months off from work. I think I'd probably spend the first half of that just trying to catch up on sleep.

I took a short break with my revision schedule this weekend. I'm still not quite done with reading through each scene and writing down larger aspects that need to be added/removed etc. But I put that aside to begin some line edits of chapter one.

I want to clean it up a bit before I submit it to Chimera Critiques so I don't look like a huge hack who can't type properly (soooo many typos...)

Also I have my writing group tonight (wOOt!) and they'll be looking at the first ten pages of chapter one as well. So I wanted to be a bit ahead of the game so I can just correct anything they find and then hopefully submit my chapter for my free critique (EXCITEMENT!)

While I was line editing I was wondering how many line edits everyone else does?
I do 2 or 3 line edits of a whole piece. I'll do one kind of early on (but not too early, I don't want to line edit a chunk that's just going to end up cut). Then I'll do one once most all of the other revisions are done. And then I do one last final one, where I read the story backwards so I can really just concentrate on each sentence alone.

How many line edits does everyone else do? It used to be that line edits were the only thing that I did to revise, just read over the story line by line, over and over again until I either thought it was done, or figured that I had had enough. But this time I'm trying something different.

How about you?

I hope everyone has a nice week!

In Which We Discuss Chapter Breaks

I think I've mentioned before that I don't naturally write with chapters in mind. I write in scenes, and the scenes are written chronologically, and clearly a few of them would be good as chapter endings based on the last line of the scene, but overall I don't put chapter breaks in while I'm writing.

Which means, of course, I have to do that later.

I think I finally got the scenes moved around and separated into viable chapters for Foxfire.

If you remember, here's what my scene blocking looked like before...

And here's what it looks like now, firmly separated into chapters.

As you can see there's no longer one giant chapter on the right hand side and the colors are spread out more evenly. I also added a few more scenes (one pink, one blue), reworked one (I took the prologue and moved it into chapter 3 or 4, can't quite remember which) and split a lengthy Quill scene into two.

Oh, since I forgot to mention this last time we discuss scene-blocking and there seems to have been quite a bit of interest in this technique I'll tell you what I put on each card.

In the upper right hand corner I wrote the scene #, in case I moved some scenes around, but then wanted to put them back in their original order. On the left hand corner I wrote the number of pages in the scene. On the blue cards, because they're from minor character POVs I put the name of the character the scene's POV was in. I didn't have to do this on the green or pink ones because green scenes = Fox, my male MC and pink = Quill, my female MC.

In the body of the cards I wrote both the first and last line of the scene. That way I could see if I was reusing any opening or closing sentences (and I was) and I could remember that I need to make each of these sentences as best as they can be and full of hooks and conflict.

Then below that I wrote a one sentence summary of the scene, just in case I couldn't tell what the scene was about from the first and last sentences. Something like "Quill is ousted from her village".

Of course, you can write whatever you want on the cards. That was just the information I found most helpful for me when scene-blocking.

Anyway, back to the chapter discussion.

I have a question for all of you who either write in chapters, or for anyone who has broken a novel out into chapters (which, I assume, would be anyone that has finished a novel)

How long do you make your chapters?

From a scene POV, you can see that all my chapters are about the same - 3 or 4 scenes, one of about each color. I purposely aimed for that because I like the symmetry of it.

But, a few of those scenes are only a few pages long (I do plan on fluffing some of them up a bit...) which means I have chapters (especially in the beginning) that are 30 pages long, and then chapters in the end that are only 9 pages long.

Do you think this is an issue? Would this bother you as a reader? As a writer? Would you even notice?

I'm just not sure if I should combine a few of the chapters just to give them a longer a chapter page count, even though it will mean giving those chapters a longer scene count. If that makes sense.

Thoughts?

How do you arrange your chapters?

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