The first thing any author wants to do with a new virgin manuscript is start rewriting it. At least I do and one of the reasons I'm writing this post is so that I can scream at myself.... for pity's sake.... no!

We all become a little insane at the end of the book. Can't get it out of our heads. Can't see the wood for the trees. There is an argument for believing that the entire process of writing a piece of fiction is simply a thinly-controlled and highly-internalised nervous breakdown designed, with a bit of luck, to produce something worthwhile at the end. Revision is the part of the game where you wake up and find yourselves strapped into the white jacket and staring around thinking: what next?

A very dangerous phase in other words. What we need more than anything is some perspective on the piece. The ability to try to see it through&nbsp; a fresh pair of eyes.

This is impossible, of course, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. Let me summarise the principle challenge I find myself facing at the this stage of the game. It can be broken down into three questions that need to be asked of every individual scene...<!--more-->
<ul>
	<li>Does it work in itself?</li>
	<li>Does it work as part of this section of the book?</li>
	<li>Does it work in the whole scheme of things, from beginning to end?</li>
</ul>
Sometimes you get scenes that are lovely but expendable. A dumb blonde starlet that's talked her way onto the set through nothing more than looks. <em>They have to go. </em>Sometimes a scene reads perfectly well but jars with what came before or what comes after. This needs attention.

And sometimes the thing raises a problem -- some narrative link, some unanswered question -- that needs to be addressed elsewhere, perhaps miles away in the story, and isn't. So either that has to be written in elsewhere or the source has to be removed.

One simple, unshakeable fact joins all these issues: you can only see them if you read the whole thing from beginning to end without serious interruption. It's fatal to start serious rewriting and try to read effectively at the same time. The point where you can do that safely will come. But it's not when you've got a rough, raw manuscript that you haven't yet considered in its entirety.

The first thing you need to do is read. I used to print things out at this point. Thanks to Scrivener that moment can wait. It has the simple annotations feature you can see below - clear, easy to use, hard to ignore.

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3576" title="Screen shot 2010-03-25 at 09.57.11" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/screen-shot-2010-03-25-at-09-57-11.png" alt="" width="592" height="149">

So all I will do at this stage is go through it page by page on screen and make notes as I go.

Yes, if I see an obvious typo it will get corrected. But rewriting?

No. We're not there yet. In fact we're not even close.