I have never corrected anything in my life. I have had my writings corrected for me (ad nauseum), but I have never been at the other end of the infamous red pen mark-up. So when I set out to rewrite/revise my book, I was flying blind as to how to indicate what should be corrected.
I decided to go back to my school days and sitting in class dreading the return of the spelling tests. In the age of auto-correct, Grammarly, and Google search, spelling tests these days have been rendered obsolete, but back in my day (ok, Boomer), if we got a word spelled incorrectly, they would put a red line through it followed by the correct word in the outer margins. That’s what I used as a basis for my corrections. For lines that I wanted removed, I would first highlight what I wanted removed and turn the text red. After that, I activated MS Word’s Strikethrough font(as a side thought, why was this not included earlier in the word processor’s life? It should have been a no-brainer). I personally thought that it was a good decision.
I ended up removing over 950 words, the first three pages!
In my own defense, it was an information dump. While fantasy novels are given the luxury of having higher acceptable word counts (150,000 max compared to the usual 90,000 max that literary novels get), starting your fantasy novel with what is essentially a travelogue is not the best way to go, no matter how “alien” the world your creating seems. If you thought that removing the first three pages because it was an information dump was bad, you should’ve read my first draft, which was basically a dissertation. Thank God I didn’t leave that stuff in.
I was happy taking an axe to paragraphs I considered to be irrelevant to the overall story but I was also hesitant. Yes, it was an information dump, but it also contained history and culture of my world, stuff that, while I didn’t want it in the main story, could serve useful. So how do I remove it from the story without actually removing it from the story?The answer was I save it in a separate document. I created a new document and pasted it into that document and saved it as “Magic Extra.” This way, I can remove it from the story but not remove it entirely from my consciousness. I’ve utilized this process three times already.
As I continued to remove globs of text from my story, I began to get laxed in the rules I set. At first, the red line through text was only supposed to be for removing text, but towards the end I started using it for stuff I wanted to reword, not necessarily remove. I put comments next to them describing why I wanted it removed or what I wanted to say in it’s place (I have a different style for that, which I’ll get into in another post so stay tuned). I realized that I needed to be careful and come up with a set of rules if I was going to continue using this process, I would have to write the rules down so I don’t forget them.
If I want text removed, put a red strikethrough (thin red line) through the text. If I want something reworded, I would put a red strikethrough and a comment to the side saying what I wanted done. This way I’ll be able to stay on target and my text won’t look like a television color test.
Is this the industry standard for revising? Who knows? Will I use a more stable procedure to revise my work in the future? Absolutely! This is another reason why I created a third draft, so I could make revisions without losing my original draft. Am I the last one to know about this idea?
Harold Ray's Writings 