Here we go.  Version four of the story is on the way.  A week of planning how to rework sixty-five scenes.  In many ways I am a pantster, but only after I’ve plotted enough of the story that I know where I’m going with it.  I tried for several days to edit the story with conversations with my editor.  It was not working.  I lacked the full vision of where the story needed changes.

There’s an old saying, “When all else fails, read the instructions.”  That is, if you can find them.  There are no good instructions on how to edit a novel length book.  There are practices used by authors, but no instructions.  This I was going to have to make it up as I went.

As an engineer, planning work is what I do.  So, I went back to my roots.  I pulled up a spreadsheet and put some headings.  I started with things that made sense.  Scene, word count, scene title, and a quick summary.  I pulled up scrivener and went down one scene at a time recording the information.

One of the issues was creating more tension and putting in a hook.  The only thing that made sense was to change the single POV to two points of view.  The two main protagonists.  I had to give Helen voice in the story.  I wrote the first scene from Helen’s POV.  I worked on it and edited it.  If felt solid.

I went back to the summary I created and added columns.  I knew I had to take about twenty percent off the book.  I used that as a guide and put the word reduction target and calculated the total revised word count.  This became my guide for how much to cut from each scene.

The next column I added was POV and realized I wanted status to keep track of where I was.  To guide my effort, I added the additional characters in a given scene.  The last thing I added was a comment section to record my opinion of what I needed to do.

I fired that off to my editor and we spent time discussing the various scenes and what the proper POV had to be.

Now that I’m seventeen scenes into what I hope is the final major revision, I like the format.  It keeps me focused on what needs to be done.  I have no problem with the new scenes, but I’m finding it hard to change the POV.  The dialog has to make sense, and it must keep the plot moving forward.