You do your major overhauls first, because you're filling plotholes, tightening up or lengthening out story-arcs, and other things like that. Vast swathes of text, or at least little swards, are not going to be the same afterward. Fixing the typos in that arc that gets cut or that scene that gets rewritten is useless. Then you do your minor overhauls—rearranging paragraphs to flow better, overhauling your prose to sound nicer, etc., maybe changing character names to be more harmonious. I could maybe understand fixing up commas and such to elucidate what is clunky and what flows, but you're still not going over it with a fine-toothed comb until you've cleared up the seriously clunky bits. Only after it's all basically neat do you go for that final polish to catch typos and comma errors and the like.
These rewrites are a disgustingly transparent and badly-constructed lie. You don't have to be an illustrator to know that you don't start adding detailed scales to a dragon that's still made of guiding lines and geometric shapes.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-21 11:18 pm (UTC)You do your major overhauls first, because you're filling plotholes, tightening up or lengthening out story-arcs, and other things like that. Vast swathes of text, or at least little swards, are not going to be the same afterward. Fixing the typos in that arc that gets cut or that scene that gets rewritten is useless. Then you do your minor overhauls—rearranging paragraphs to flow better, overhauling your prose to sound nicer, etc., maybe changing character names to be more harmonious. I could maybe understand fixing up commas and such to elucidate what is clunky and what flows, but you're still not going over it with a fine-toothed comb until you've cleared up the seriously clunky bits. Only after it's all basically neat do you go for that final polish to catch typos and comma errors and the like.
These rewrites are a disgustingly transparent and badly-constructed lie. You don't have to be an illustrator to know that you don't start adding detailed scales to a dragon that's still made of guiding lines and geometric shapes.