Brenn asked Mary Robinette Kowal:

Thank you so much for your books and stories and for keeping the guys in line on the Writing Excuses workshop. :) And for giving McGuire's Tybalt such a yummy voice. My question is about process. When you finish the first draft, what steps do you take to mark what needs to be changed/fixed in the second draft?

Mary Robinette Kowal (Tybalt is super fun to read and A RED ROSE CHAIN the new book? Fantastic. You'll love it.)

Okay! So... finishing a draft. As I'm writing, I make notes to myself about things I need to fix by putting them in square brackets where it occurs to me, [establish that the break is fresh earlier] or [describe dress here]

So my first step is to go through and fix all of the brackets I've left for myself.

Next I pass it to beta-readers without word-smithing. I tell them to give me very specific responses about how the story is striking them. No suggestions, just their reactions. I want to know what triggers Awesome (so I don't fix it), Bored, Confused, or Disbelief. That's it. Nothing else.

Then I go through and make a fresh set of brackets. I call this my structure pass. What I do is make notes about what I need to fix WITHOUT fixing it yet. Why? Because a lot of times it can trigger a cascading set of failures OR the fix turns out to be in a totally different part of the manuscript.

Once I've marked it up with brackets again, I fix them.

Then I give it to a fresh set of readers, to see if I've ACTUALLY fixed the problems.

If it's mostly clean, I move on to my language pass.

This is where I finally worry about wordsmithing. The first thing I do is change the on the text. Why? Because it forces your brain to interact with it in a different way. You can't skim because it's familiar.

I read through, looking for redundancies, pacing issues, repetition, awkward phrasing, and stuff like that. I fix them.

THEN I read it aloud to someone.

And then I'm usually finished. Usually.

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