November 30th
Final day!
We hope you followed the advice and didn’t read or edit for three whole days.
Today, re-read it with new eyes. As you read, make any edits to typos you see, or when it doesn’t quite flow right. Keep in mind all the feedback you got and if that inspired any changes you want to make.
Don’t re-write the whole thing. This is only an edit today. And you likely have more to keep writing to complete your novel – enjoy doing so!
Editing should not be a total re-write. It’s just fixing grammar mistakes and making small changes. A conversation didn’t sound correct, so you change it up. A fight scene was a big garbled so you give it a few more details or change the order you described it in. Something you took as a fact wasn’t clear to your reader during review, so you give it some clarity with a few more sentences.
Finish!
Re-read and make small edits. Done? Hooray!
Not only have you finished the Senior Novelist NaNoWriMo, but you have not finished the final requirement for the Senior Novelist GSUSA badge.
Days 1-6, when we figured out the details on our novel, we figured out how plot lines are made (deconstruct a novel) and made our own (develop a plot). We created character sheets (create great characters) and then dove in to write at least 20 pages (Days 7-26). We took a break and got some feedback so we could re-read one last time and make some edits (edit your pages). All five requirements are now complete!
Wear this badge with pride. You earned it above and beyond!
Want an Example?
We re-read and did some edits from our reviewer to the beginning – maybe the first 10 pages or so. The rest we just re-read and made some edits when we saw a typo and kept in mind some of the feedback and added a few more details to the summaries we had in the later part of the story.
24 pages total and a very interesting writing experience for us. Totally new topic, new environment, and prompts that were challenging to fit in. But it’s a desert word with fighting gods where someone is leaving. We managed to get dragons and a mirror of truth in there. Clara and Ava were auto generated characters we made work with the story and fell in love with a little bit.
If you want to read what the end result was to compare – be gentle. This is definitely a rough draft. We hope you enjoy and are gentle on yourself as well. Anyone that reached 20 pages is a winner – and if you aren’t happy with what you wrote, it isn’t written in stone. Have fun with it until you can share it with joy.
Just don’t post it on the internet like us. Once it’s out there, anyone (person or A.I.) can use it. Copyright is hard to enforce if it isn’t a published work. We don’t mind if someone took this idea and did something with it. But your ideas are yours. Keep them safe until you want to share.
Edit to add: It took two months before we were able to go back and apply all the feedback we got and re-write the missing scenes we put placeholders in. In the end, we had 39 total double spaced pages. Compare the first version to the second. This is an example of what you might do with a re-write.
(Go back to Day 29?)
The Badge Archive 