Normally this time of year I’d be posting about preparation for NaNoWriMo, one of my most favorite annual writing events. However, as many of us writers and creatives are finding, creating NEW work this year has been tough. While I have buds of story ideas, the strain that is 2020 keeps them from growing. The good news is that I have plenty of stories in progress that need tending, so 2020 is the perfect year to attempt my first ever Revise-O-Wrimo.
My YA novel is currently stuck in mud, so I’ll be revising my chapter book for Revise-O-Wrimo. Chapter books are considerably shorter than YA (<15k words for chapter books and 70k+ words for sci-fi/fantasy YA). Given the shorter word count, I’m going to attempt to revise my chapter book twice in one month. Ambitious? Yes, but does it fall in line with the ambition of NaNoWriMo? 100%. So I say, let’s do this!
Revise-O-Wrimo 2020 Plan
This is my first time using NaNoWriMo for revision, and my first time revising a chapter book, so I’m making up most of this as I go. It’s a little fun, and a little intimidating, to not know if my plan will be effective, but a big part of the writer’s journey is learning what works and what doesn’t work for your writing process. I think I’ll learn a lot in November :)
I first needed to a set a goal for my revisions. This is important for building a reasonable plan across the month.
Goal: Complete two full manuscript revisions in order to have a draft ready for critique by the end of November.
Once I established my goal, I broke the month up into two halves for revision #1 and revision #2. The first half of the month will focus on structure and story backbone. The second half will focus on voice and fun.
Then, I created a calendar (below), and plotted out what I would work on for each day, leaving the last couple of days for a final read through and fine tune edits.
And because I like to plan, plan, plan, I broke it down a bit further in another document with additional notes and context.
First Half of November: Structure and Backbone
1: Read full manuscript, assess story structure, identify where structural changes are needed
2: Chapter 1
3: Chapter 2
4: Chapter 3
5: Chapter 4
6: Chapter 5
7: Chapter 6
8: Chapter 7
9: Chapter 8
10: Chapter 9
11: Chapter 10
12: Chapter 11
13: Extra Day for Any Chapters Not Completed
14: Read full manuscript, assess and fine tune story structure
Second Half of November: Voice and Fun
15: Read full manuscript, assess for voice and fun, identify areas needing work
16: Chapter 1
17: Chapter 2
18: Chapter 3
19: Chapter 4
20: Chapter 5
21: Chapter 6
22: Chapter 7
23: Chapter 8
24: Chapter 9
25: Chapter 10
26: Chapter 11
27: Extra Day for Any Chapters Not Completed
28: Extra Day for Any Chapters Not Completed
29: Read full manuscript, assess for big picture and/or fine tune issues
30: Extra Day for final revision
My plan looks good. It’s feasible and will get me to my end goal. Success! All this planning is great, but as a two-time NaNoWriMo winner, I can confidently say that the most important key to NaNo success, whether writing or revising, is to be flexible. It helps to have a plan, but on day 4, you might not be inspired to work on day 4’s plan. Hopping around is OK, so even though I have things broken out day-by-day, the most important part of the plan is to stay flexible and work on different chapters as needed in order to keep my momentum going.
While I will certainly have some FOMO watching NaNoWriMos doing word sprints to hustle towards 50k new words of a novel, I am excited about using this writing event to make meaningful progress on my stories. As they say, each writer’s journey is different, and we have to be true to what we need. So, here’s to my first Revise-O-Wrimo! And whether or not you’re working toward 50k words in November, I wish you success this coming month, too!