HTRYN Week 5 Finshed

I have not been updating is blog very much in the past couple of weeks, I know, but I have been editing. I finished Week 5 the previous Sunday and started Week 6 on Monday. but I have not gotten very far with it.  I really should spend the entire day today working on it, but I am not so sure that I will.  I tend to procrastinate in this way and I have had a headache for the past couple of days, not a bad one just an annoying one.

Anyway, Week 5 of the How to Revise Your Novel course is all about conflict.  I had to find all the major conflicts in my novel and decide whether they were deep enough, good enough, barely there, or non-existent.  I also had to focus on whether the conflicts were resolved and whether they even matter to the story.  And CONFLICT doesn't simply mean two people arguing either. And I did notice that I tend to understand conflict as two people arguing, or that's how I end up writing it, anyway. Though I do have the other type of conflict, the more subtle one of the "something standing in the way of what someone wants" kind. 

But my book is, in so many ways, a first draft and all that it entails.  I did not develop the main idea fully, I left a whole bunch of important things out and I will have to rewrite and add a lot.  But at least now I have this HTRYN blueprint on how to go about finding problems. In other words, I have an entire editing plan.

The way the HTRYN course is set up, is that it breaks up the novel into manageable parts based on each important element. in this way you are not faced with a daunting task of editing the entire novel all at once, since you get to focus on only small parts of it.  And eventually, by the end of the course everything gets put together.  I really can't recommend it enough!