This is the last post regarding combining two rough drafts into one novel. The first one can be found here and the second, here. It’s been a heck of a struggle, but I’m happy now with what I’m considering the rough draft of Letting Go (working title).
Some difficulties I ran into were: characters (names, ages, descriptions, etc.) Thankfully (?) I’m not very descriptive in my rough drafts so it wasn’t too hard to change those things. I did have some problems with getting the names right throughout. For example, using “Find and Replace” to change “Matt” into “Lance” resulted in several places that said, “What really Lanceers is…”
Looking on the bright side, I now realize that I overused the phrase “What really matters,” in dialogue.
This was the first time in quite a while that I’ve actually used scissors and tape to cut sections of the manuscript up and move it around. I probably should have used Scrivener, but I was being stubborn and didn’t want to fight with software. That’s a mistake that wasted a lot of time for me. Today, after I made all the changes in Pages, I copied and pasted all the new text into Scrivener. I should have just left it in Scrivener and figured out how to make it do what I wanted.
Now that I have a rough draft of one story, I’m letting it sit for a few days before I start my normal revision process. While it sits, I have a notepad nearby so I can scribble any ideas that pop into my head. This way, I might have things sorted out in my head when I start to mark up the next revision. I know many areas are skimpy on details and I add things throughout my revision process.