For me, editing/redrafting is a vastly more intimidating process than writing the initial draft. I can recognize things that need to be altered or fixed, but once I begin that process, I feel that I have difficulty focusing the elements into a cohesive whole. How do you manage taming all the threads?
I keep telling myself that if I don’t fix it in this draft, I can do another one, and that’s okay. So narrowing down my drafting goals to something manageable each time helps a lot. Also, giving myself specific goals. If a character needs to be revised, I look for every scene with that character and make the revisions. I don’t always read the whole book, I go and fix that character. Then, when I next read the book, I can watch for continuity with the fixes.
It doesn’t need to be done all at once. Be like a sculptor, going through, slowly working the shape out of the stone pass by pass.
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