Editing The Gingerbread House: Stage 1

Last week, I finished the first draft of The Gingerbread House. I’m reasonably happy with the story, but I know there are problems with the structure and the flow, not to mention the stilted character development.

I did minor editing as I wrote: I corrected spelling/typing errors, reworded awkward sentences, changed the ending of scenes a bit so they flowed better into the next scene. This wasn’t a thorough editing at all; it was simply picking up things I noticed as I wrote. My focus was to keep writing, not fix things.

When I began writing, I created a number of documents that mapped out the proposed plot and development of the characters. I’ll be going back to those documents soon but, first, I need to map out what I actually have down on paper. Once I have that done, I can compare what I had planned with what I ended up with and decide on the best approach to improve it. I might need to change things to match the original plan, or I might need to toss the plan out the window and create a new structure that works.

There are going to be changes. The original plot had nine scenes; the final draft has fifteen.

My scene maps for editing include a couple of things a lot of scene maps don’t. I add the extra bits so I can create a list of things to do to fix problems, and know exactly where to find the section I need to fix.

Below is and extract of the scene map for The Gingerbread House. You can find the complete scene map here. This is the first editing run. The scene map will be added to once I begin to compare the before and after documents.

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