Do you read through your drafts in their entirety...

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Becky Black

Writing my way off the B Ark
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I do and in fact I just have read the full first draft of the one I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year, because I'm about to start editing that. I think it's important to do that, to get a feel for the big picture, the story as a whole, not only the chapter in front of you. How else will you get a feel for the pace and structure of it? I always read it on my Kindle now.

Whether you should read yours again depends on what you've done so far to turn draft 1 into draft 2. Have you made a lot of structural changes, moves a lot of scenes around? Have added new scenes, cut others. In which case I'd say yes, read it again to get a feel for the new shape of the story. You can make notes as you go if you want, about the larger things that need changing to have it make since in the new order.

Or maybe you want to make those changes to have it make sense, still quite roughly, and then do another read.

But either way, is it going to harm you or the story to have another read now? It's a few hours out of the many, many, many hours of work you'll be doing. So why not?
 

Msdobing

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Thanks everyone for some really great feedback. There's a variety of approaches to this I can see that all have their own merits.

For me, I now seem to have settled into a bit of a hybrid. I opted against doing a full "hands off" read through at this point as I knew that there still a lot of structural edits required and I just wouldn't be able to ignore these doing a hands off read through.

I'm doing a "hands on read through" now on my laptop - making the heavy duty edits as I go to structure, continuity etc (similar to the Holly Lisle approach referenced earlier in this thread). The end result should be the story now follows my revised synopsis without any of the random plot/character tangents that I know are present.

There will be another draft I know, but hopefully that one will be just typos, tweaking etc before finally getting some external feedback.

Really, thanks again everyone, this has been really helpful.

Mike
 
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