On my first rewrite, I went through from beginning to end, deleting and adding to the story. Then I printed it out and had someone read through it for grammar and anything else. (She was nice enough to read through it several times, and will after I make changes again, which I hope means it is not too boring) Now I plan on working backwards. I have a notebook full of page number with corrections and suggestions. If I start on the last page and work backward, all the numbers in the notebook will remain true as the word count changes. Has anyone else attempted such a thing?
If I'm critiquing purely for grammar I do the same thing. For me, it works really well...I'll usually pick out a few things even on a "clean" manuscript. It's really, really boring, though.
No. Nor do I think I would, because consequences of change propagate forward, not backward. Besides, if I make annotations, I do them in Word, not in a notebook. For one thing, my handwriting is illegible, even to me. If I make notes on a printed manuscript, I will locate them in the Word document by context, not by page number, anyway. But this is certainly a matter of personal preference. If it works for you, go for it!
I never work on paper. The notebook is the reader’s. I think I know the story well enough that I can work backwards without getting into a problem.
Well, I plan on doing twenty pages at a time, fixing the errors first, and then going forward from that point to do the more complicated changes, and then going back twenty more.
my stories have plot-arcs that span the whole series. sometimes i start with the ideas for the final episode before working on the rest. is that what you mean?
sounds like a lot more work than it should be... i see no benefit at all to doing it backwards, so it makes no sense to me...
I can see no possible benefit of going backwards...matching numbers to pages shouldn't be difficult at all if you work forward, since I assume they were written in chronological order? So maybe the page numbers won't exactly match, but it will be obvious what they mean because they will refer to something coming up in the text...
I say whatever works for you. Wouldn't work for me because it disrupts the flow and I wouldn't be able to get a feel for how the story transitions from one part to the next. I just think it seems easier to see the story as a whole when progressing forward. And yes I've edited my stories by reading back words.
