After leaving my first draft alone for a couple of days, it’s time to start editing. As my first step, I reread what I had written. As I had expected, there’s a lot wrong with it. The dialogue is rather clumsy. So is a lot of the description. There’s an awful lot of repetition. The setting needs a lot of work. So do many of the characters. And of course there’s that chunk I wrote to finish off the draft, which wasn’t gone over the way everything else was; that’s going to need a lot of work.
But in the middle of everything, I also found a lot of things that I liked. Once the story got going, for the most part it seemed to move along rather nicely. This was really thanks to the Skeksis, and one in particular. The scenes with him were just as much fun to read as they were to write. While I know that the rewrites are rather extensive, the scenes with him made me feel like I am on the right track.
So having reread what I’ve written, it’s time to start fixing everything up. My plan is to start with the characters, making sure they’re all solid before even attempting to rewrite their dialogue.
An Acquaintance with Letters 