Monday, May 4, 2009

Question about Rewrites

Ok, so I'm knee-deep in revising my first novel draft. Not only do I need to clean up on a grammar level, I have many significant storyline revisions. The joys of rereading and realizing how much you need to change to make a story work.

I digress. I'm wondering if it's useful to even bother with grammar clean-up when I'm changing most of the story around anyways. I feel like I could work through and change the story to what it's supposed to be, then work on clean-up and it would be faster rather than letting grammar games bog me down in the middle of a rewrite.

Thoughts?

3 comments:

The Screaming Guppy said...

Tough. I would say whatever is working for you. It's hard not to tweak as you go, of course.

But, I would elect to do story revisions first and the rest later if it was me.

Danyelle L. said...

I generally try to get the big stuff out of the way like the story lines and do the grammar fixing during the more final stages of revisions.

Anonymous said...

I may be the worst of the grammar freaks. However, when I'm working on my own stories (again, downwards of 3,000 words of non-fiction) I work on all of my content and clean up the grammar the end. But if I find little things along the way, I go ahead and fix them then rather than going "oh, I'll do it later." It gets harder to see my grammar mistakes the longer I've looked at a set of words.