Angela Quarles 7 Steps to Revising Your NaNoWriMo Story
So a USA Today Bestselling author who is also a participant of NaNoWriMo. Her 2010 NaNoWriMo story became a bestseller. These are her tips for revising her NaNoWriMo stories. 1. Read it through in its entirety, but don’t get hung up on nitpick-y editing. At this stage I’m looking to see what the heck I’ve written and make notes of any changes I’d need to make. Some of these are big-picture thoughts I write in the Notes section for that scene in Scrivener, or it’s a footnote I’ve added to a word or sentence. At this point, I’m only concentrating on the big picture—the bones of the story. This is the Emergency Room stage—your story is bleeding, the plot has so many holes, or is missing an entire limb, and so you should only be figuring out what the massive wounds might be and how to fix them. Don’t worry about the small cuts. Not yet. Resist. 2. As I’m going through, I also write down a short summary of each scene in the Synopsis “card” in Scrivener. 3. Once done, I go b...