THE L&L BLOG / Scrivener

Why You Might Want to Retype Your Draft when Revising

When you’ve finished the draft of your novel, it’s time to start revising. Some authors find it useful to retype their entire draft. Here’s why.

Whether you’ve just finished NaNoWriMo, or you’ve finished the first draft of a novel any other time, it’s time to start revising. Maybe not right away; it can be good to let your project sit for a few weeks so you can approach it with less familiarity than if you start revising right away.

When you start the revision process, there are many ways you can do this, and Scrivener can help as you go through your draft. But there’s one way to revise your draft that you may not have considered: retyping your entire manuscript.

This may sound like a lot of work, but many authors find that this allows them to revise more thoroughly. Here’s why you might want to retype your draft when revising.

What it means to retype your draft

Retyping your draft means that you start a new section of your Scrivener project, or create a new project, and retype every word of your draft. You can use Split View to see the originals next to new files as you type. You could also compile your project to PDF and view it on your screen, or you could print it out.

If your first draft is 50,000 or 80,000 words, then retyping that draft means typing 50,000 or 80,000 words, plus or minus whatever changes you make. For many people, this can be a big hurdle, especially if you’re a slow typist. This can be a lot of work, but if you’ve ever revised a draft of that length, it may have taken you just as long as it would have if you had retyped it.

Why retyping your draft might be the ideal way to revise

When you retype your draft, you have to reconsider every word and every sentence that you’ve written. As you type, you evaluate every phrase, every verb and adjective, every bit of dialog, rather than skimming over passages that are familiar.

Two recent guests on the Write Now with Scrivener podcast discussed how they do this when revising. Natasha Bell said that, “you’re asking a reader to read every single word you’ve written. And once you get to that almost final draft, you’re numb to everything, you’re not even reading your whole sentences because you know them so well. I think forcing yourself to engage with your work again on the sentence level, and think about, ‘what am I asking the reader to spend their time engaging with? And is it worth it? Is this sentence really earning its weight?’”

Veronica Roth said, “A lot of revising is about forcing yourself to reprocess the language. A lot of people read their drafts out loud to re-experience it. But I think you can also make yourself do that by retyping. I read it, I don’t know how it is for other people, but I just can’t see errors anymore. I can’t see it anymore because I already have a vision of what’s happening on the page and whether I’ve written it effectively or not. So I have to slow it down for myself, otherwise I’ll miss everything.”

Another author who does this is Ken Follett. In a video interview with the BBC, Follett shows how he works. He has three screens connected to his computer. One contains his first draft. Another screen has notes from people who have read the first draft. And in the center, he retypes the first draft. “It sounds as if it’s a chore that might not be essential,” he says, but this allows him to perfect his writing. This is a time-consuming process: Follett says that after a year of research, writing his first draft takes a year, and retyping it with revisions takes another year, but his novels are about 800 to 1,200 pages long.

What to look for when retyping your draft

If you’ve completed a novel, you’ve most likely done this over a long period of time. There are chapters you’ve written when you’ve been motivated, and others where you weren’t. As you progress in a novel, you’ve learned a lot about your characters, settings, and plot. Going back and starting over from the beginning allows you to see your entire novel through the lens of your experience of writing that novel. As you’ve written, your characters have grown, but so have you.

You’re not the writer you were when you started writing your novel.

You may also notice changes in style from the beginning to the end of your draft. If you retype everything, you can smooth over these differences; your style will be today’s style, not the style you wrote last year or the year before. You’re not the writer you were when you started writing your novel.

As you retype, you may also reimagine certain scenes. If you revise your draft by making edits to your existing manuscript, you may not appreciate elements that break up the flow of your chapters. Retyping everything allows you to discover the beats of each scene and ensure that they fit in a way that tells your story efficiently. You can focus more on the characters of your novel as you retype. Hearing their voices in dialog, and rediscovering your descriptions, you can refine characters and make them come alive.

You can also spot inconsistencies more easily. You might skip over them when editing a draft, because you’ve read them so many times, but when re-typing, anything that doesn’t fit will stand out and cause you to question it, correcting small and large elements as you progress.

Another option is to retype the manuscript using your voice. Dictation is a good way to write, and you may find it especially effective for rewriting. Since you use your voice, you’ll be able to hear how your sentences sound, how your characters’ dialog flows, and you’ll be able to spot pacing that doesn’t feel right. This sort of dictation isn’t perfect, and you will have to correct it as you go along, but using your voice to revise your entire novel can give you a total of different feeling for it.

Retyping your draft can allow you to establish a consistent voice and make changes that reflect your growth as an author.

Retyping your draft can take a long time, but there are many benefits to this type of revision. If you’ve been working on a novel for many years, retyping your draft can allow you to establish a consistent voice and make changes that reflect your growth as an author.

Kirk McElhearn is a writerpodcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.

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