Leave the petals on the daisy–

Here’s a better way to sort through the carnival parade also known as First Draft.

Week 4 of How to Revise Your Novel teaches how to find those scenes that are part of the plot or part of the subplot or–Oh! the Pain!–part of the notplot.

Here students discuss the downside and the upside of this process of discovery.

• I know my heroine inside-out;
• The theme and premise and original idea are still intact despite this change in plot/subplot;
• I now have a high-stake plot to take through to its conclusion whereas before I didn’t know what the next step should be; and
• The revision I began in July can now be consigned to the bottom of a drawer because the revision was still in my heroine’s pov and, while it was better than the first draft, it was the wrong angle for the story.