Saturday, February 2, 2019

Sharing a rough draft evaluation technique.

I've just finished the first draft of a novel, and decided on a particular evaluation method towards editing and polishing it up that I would like to relate.
The old scholastic method of "outlining," I've found, takes a bit long when you want a story to be gotten out relatively soon, so I'm doing a sort of compressed way of outlining the story on the rough draft of my new adventure story (about which you'll hear in a little while).  I reread each chapter, and then mark down, in a list, chapter by chapter over several days, primarily the "Main Point" each chapter focuses on, then, below the "Main Point," each of three "Secondary Points" of each chapter, besides.
As soon as this is done with the whole draft, I'm then going to use post-it notes to link points between chapters to hopefully tighten up the plot, make it sounder, more entertaining, a better story overall.  And, of course, I'm going to heavily edit the story itself accordingly.
It's simple, and yet I believe it could work.  I wonder if other writers have edited according to anything similar to the "Main Point"/"Secondary Points" method of outlining.

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