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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34024
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/34024
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I personally would NOT recommend writing a second book while revising the first. It is important to keep the first book in your head as a whole, a second book in my head would result in a jumbled and useless edit due to forgotten or mistaken plot threads and characters.

Pro writers that do a book a year do it **raw start to final finish.** Multi-tasking doesn't save you any time or make you type faster, it just reduces the quality of your work on **both** things. If you have 2000 hours in a year to write, spending 25% on revision and 75% on writing means you can't finish a book in a year that takes 2000 hours to write!

Also, give your group one chapter to read, and get feedback, and revise it, and give them the revision, and get feedback, and revise it.

If you are worried about the character arcs and plots, write what Hollywood calls a "treatment" of your novel. A screenplay in Hollywood is typically 110 pages or so. A **treatment** is a 3-5 page summary of every plot line and character arc, not written as either prose or an outline, but a kind of summary of each scene the screenwriter envisions, so it reads like a "just the facts" short story. It gives all the main beats of the story and **does** reveal any twists or surprises and the ending. It seldom includes any dialogue, except perhaps iconic lines: "I'll be back."

You can see that this is around 3.5% of the finished page count, so similarly, try writing for your 200K words a 7000 word treatment of your entire story. Go through all your scenes, count them, and divide 7000 words by the number of scenes you have. Devote that many words to the beats (an important point) in each scene, as part of the short story of your novel.

That treatment can be used to help you identify problems in the plot or characters, or identify scenes that are worthless, and your summary of what the scene does can be your guide to rewriting that scene: you know what it is supposed to accomplish so you can better cut the fat.

In your summary, look for repetition (unnecessary) and opportunities to combine partially matching scenes into a single scene, reducing word count.

In any case, revise your **_treatment_** to tell the same story in about 3500 words.

THEN give the revised treatment to your group; hopefully you can reduce it to 3000 or 4000 words, as it should be for a novel. Tell them what it is and get critiques on that, for the plot and characters, since they should be revealed by the treatment.

Use the feedback on a representative chapter as your lessons in actually writing prose and dialogue better, and use the feedback on the treatment as your lessons in plotting and story structure and character development.

Original score: 5