You've done it - you've ploughed your way through the terrible first draft, squidged over the soggy middle sections, minced around overwritten dialogue and grinned maniacally at the world after placing that period at the end of the last sentence. It's finished. You have A Novel. Probably not a terribly good novel - we are, after all, being honest with ourselves about the realities of rewriting - but it's A Novel, nonetheless. You are now A Novelist. And now, it's time for big, serious novelist things like Editing, Re-Drafting, Revising.

No it isn't. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. If you dive in now (even after the requisite six weeks (or whatever your pause-preference is) of waiting) you'll be plopping yourself right back in that forest, trying to shape the path when you can only see a few metres ahead. Sure, your subconscious will have had fabulous ideas in the meantime, and you'll have realised exactly what that scene with the eggtimer and the chainsaw needs to make it work, and why it just wasn't feeling right when Billy left Jilly. But you won't have the overall landscape in your head - you can't. It's just not possible to keep an entire novel in your head as one big lump.

So - we need an overview of the structure, the developments, the plot, the arcs, the pacing, the tension. We need these so we can draw up a battleplan for that forest - for where the vicious pruning and careful nuturing will fall. Without this, you're really just writing another first draft. SO how do we get one?

Analysis of the text. For those of you who studied Literature at University (or high school, to some degree), this is where all those skills become relevant to your writing career. If it's been so long that you've forgotten, don't worry - for one thing, it's a skill that you can reacquire relatively easily, and for another, it's really just common sense applied to a 'process'. And that process is largely dependent on what works for you. This is, after all, purely for the purposes of you understanding your own novel better. It's not a book report.

So - take the process here and adapt it. Add in extra things that are important to you, or address things you do too often or not enough. Cut out things that aren't relevant to your story, or to how you work. Make this your own, develop it. And don't forget to note down how you did this for next time.

For those of you who planned your novel before writing it, don't think you get off easy, here. You had a blueprint before you started, but a blueprint isn't a house. The house doesn't necessarily follow the blueprint at all (I once lived in a house that sat a full 90 degrees from where its plans said it was supposed to...) and if you base your analysis on the plans instead of the work, you might as well spend the time colouring in the margins for all the help it'll be to you. Work with the text, not the plan.

Step one - super-synopsis

I can hear you all groaning at the 's' word up there, but it's necessary, not as hard as it sounds, and there's a lot more to it than just writing what the storyline is.

I recommend creating an excel spreadsheet for this, because there's a lot of 'rate this factor', which you can pull into handy graphs, you can copy-paste for common things, and even set up lovely formulas that pull things together the way you want them to in magical ways.

Go through your MS, chapter-by-chapter. If your chapters are long (more than 3-4000 words), divide the chapter into sections, scenes or beats. Make a note of the following for each:

• Plot
  • What's actually happening
  • what's the point of this scene
  • what's the chief drama of this scene
  • which storylines are served by this scene, and how
• Character:
  • who's here
  • what do they want
  • why do they want it
  • what's stopping them from getting it
  • what are they going to do about that?
  • where have they come from (emotionally and locationally)
  • where in their developmental arc are they (you may want to use a numerical scale, or just an 'early, early-middle, middle, late-middle, late" type scale.)
  • where are they going (ditto)
  • who's narrating / being a narrative focus (keep a careful eye on this one: you might shift during the chapter)
• Location (for consistency, sense and logistics)
  • where is this (may be several locations)
  • when is this, and how long for
  • any special rules about this place (no magic, characters aren't allowed here, etc)
• Meta-story
  • what 'themes' are being served here and how (use your own definition of 'theme'. If you wrote the novel without a theme in mind, now's a really good time to find out what themes you put in there!)
  • what are you foreshadowing and how
  • rate the 'tension-level' of this section
  • rate the relevance for each storyline and character arc for this section (I like to use a scale from 0 to 3. 0 if the scene does nothing for an arc, 1 if it foreshadows or drops a hint about something, 2 if it makes a minor progression, 3 if it makes a moderate progression, and 5 for big-dramatic-climactic-progressions. This way, you can set up a graph to show the rise and fall of relevance, and the cumulative development of the arc through the novel.) This means for a complex novel, you'll probably have about a dozen ratings, here.
  • rate the 'action-level' of this section - are the characters doing things, or thinking about them instead? Note, tension is not the same as action, although they're often closely related.
  • rate how much you like this scene - is it holding your interest, is it enjoyable
• Notes-to-self - things that occur to you as you're reading this, that you think you'll need to change.

There's more you can record, and I might even find I need to go back and edit this when I write the second-half (where you do stuff with all this data you just collected), but that should serve your purpose for now. Add in anything else you think is important, like 'props', or particular notable character developments (whether Jimmy knows how to cast Lightning Bolt yet or not, if Billy hates Jilly yet, etc)

Resist the urge to do line-edits while you're there or make rearrangements as you go - use the notes section instead. You don't want to get distracted from distilling the novel into rewriting draft one into another draft one. Just record, don't revise. And don't give in, either - your novel may feel like the worst ever written, but that just means it'll be so much easier to make it better!

Once you've made your giant spreadsheet, you need to do some actual brain-work thinking about it and discovering things - I'll cover that in a future post.

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