Pitch Wars Blog Tour: The Off-The-Wall Editing Trick that Got Me into Pitch Wars by Alex Ames

I am a chaotic writer. I’m a pantser of the highest order. I write the ending of a book first before I write anything else, and then I go back to write the beginning. After that, I fill in the middle as scenes come to me. I don’t break the book up into chapters until the whole thing is written. I write out of order, and then move the scenes around later on. These are just some of the examples of how messy my writing process can be.

Don’t come to me telling me that plotting saves you a lot of time when drafting a novel. I’ve done that, too. Guess what? It doesn’t save me any time whatsoever. In fact, it adds more time and effort for me.

My editing process isn’t any better. I typically outline the book after it’s written, and that allows me to see where revisions need to be made. I’ll start with the easiest/smallest edits first, and then work my way up to the big ones. I also use alpha and beta readers, of course, and incorporate their feedback as well.

But my most unhinged editing tip is the one that I know works, because it resulted in the version of The Chamos Project that got me into Pitch Wars.

I wrote the first draft of TCP in 2013 as my NaNoWriMo project that year, and it was a 190,000-word monstrosity by the time it was finished. I set it aside for a while, and then pulled it out again in 2014 to start revising it. But each revision was lackluster, and it wasn’t shaping up to be the story that I wanted it to be.

That’s when I decided to re-type the whole thing from scratch.

I only had a single screen at the time, so I used half the screen on my laptop for my existing draft and half the screen for the blank Word document that would be the newest version of the book. Almost from the moment I started re-typing the novel, it became something different. In the earliest versions of the book, Leander was living an isolated life in a farmhouse. In that shiny new draft, suddenly he was on an ocean vessel. In the early drafts, it was his old friend Captain Reed who persuaded him to come back to space; in the new one, it was the Alliance Fleet that forced him back into service.

So much changed that soon I was writing a completely new book and wasn’t even referencing my old draft anymore. When I finished, I had a much more reasonable 130,000-word draft, and something that I felt was a solid, compelling story. I edited that down to 120,000 words and submitted it to Pitch Wars in the summer of 2018, where it caught the eye of my future mentor, Sarah Remy.

It’s a time-consuming and inefficient way to revise a book. It also got me into Pitch Wars, and then it got me an agent. I don’t do this for every book I write; I simply don’t have the time. But I’ve done it for short stories, and I pulled it out of my back pocket for The Chamos Project because it was the book of my heart, the one thing I’ve written that I love more than anything else.

If everything else has failed you—if your normal revision process isn’t working for a book that you absolutely love, if you know it has the potential to be something more than it is but you don’t know how to get it there—then I suggest throwing out the normal revision ways and doing something completely unhinged. Sometimes the unconventional route is the way to go!