Graphic by Peg Ihinger
Finishing your first novel is a matter of lather, rinse, and repeat—you write a bunch of pages, pause to think and make up more, or do some suddenly-necessary research, or reassure yourself that you really did put that necessary information in some prior chapter, and then you go on. Along the way, you learn how your process works. You also learn which parts of writing come naturally and which ones you have to really work at (viewpoint, dialog, plot, structure, characterization, pacing, etc.). You get better at all of it. And then you finally get to the end.
Writing “The End” on your first novel is a rush, even if you already know you’re going to have to do a bunch of revising afterward. (You will almost certainly want to revise; writing that many pages is enough practice that your writing will have improved enormously over the course of finishing, and since your opening chapters will not reflect your new skill level, you will want to at least even them out, so that the story doesn’t feel lopsided.)
That is, writing “The End” is a rush if you recognize it when you get to it. I’ve known several writers—usually character-centered ones—who have blown straight past what is to me the obvious ending of the novel they are writing and halfway into the next one, before realizing that the current story was over a while ago, even if the character’s life and adventures are continuing on. If this happens, it is usually at least mildly disconcerting when you realize it, but there’s something to be said for having a jump-start on your second book.
Once you write “The End”—and you’re sure of it—it’s usually a good idea to take a short break before you start revising. How long…for me, it’s one to two weeks; some writers prefer longer, some jump right into revising after a couple of days.
The revision process is usually multi-faceted. There are big, obvious problems; typos and not-quite-right word choices; consistency issues (minor and major); things that will take a few words or a sentence to make work; things that require an entire new scene; things that ripple through however much of the book is left and things that don’t. Once again, the process is different for everybody, and experimenting is the only way I know to figure out what works for you.
Keep in mind that “what works” may be different for different kinds of problems. For instance, it may make sense to start at the beginning and work methodically in order if you’re focusing on things that take a sentence or two to fix, but if you know you have to add an entire scene or two, you may want to do that first, so that if you have to make additional changes in other parts of the manuscript due to what happens in the scene, you know what they are.
I usually do a preliminary pass through the manuscript, peppering it with sticky notes or comment balloons (depending on whether I’m looking at hardcopy or something in my word processor), and consolidating any comments I’ve gotten from beta readers and my crit group. I try to fix the really easy things—typos, some word changes—as soon as I see them if I’m working on the laptop. There’s no point in waiting if all it takes is noticing it and three keystrokes. Some obvious fixes are a little more complicated (rewriting a confusing sentence, discovering that I have mixed up the names of two characters in such a way that I can’t just do a search-and-replace on one of them, etc.); those, I mark for later.
Then I try to mentally group the various changes by hard vs easy/obvious, long vs. short, and concentrated vs. diffuse. Hard fixes are the ones where I know something is wrong, but either I’m not sure what; I know what it is, but I’m not sure how to fix it; or I know what and how, but I also know it is going to be a huge pain to do. Long fixes need a page or more of reworking, up to an entire new chapter or more; short ones only take a few sentences. “Concentrated” means the entire fix can happen in just one spot (things like planting the discovery of a key clue, which would only happen once); “diffuse” means that the “fix” is going to need a lot of little tweaks spread over multiple chapters (pacing and tension issues usually fall into this category, as do inconsistencies in characterization or voice).
Then it becomes a matter of what I have time and energy for on that specific day, as well as which things have really started to bug me. My first pass (I go through the first draft multiple times before I consider it an actual second draft), I usually start at the beginning and go through it in order, skipping anything that I can’t figure out or finish in a couple of minutes. This clears out the mental underbrush, so I can think about the harder/longer/more time-consuming things.
Sometimes, though, there’s one problem (usually something that is long, hard, and/or diffuse) that I know is going to affect lots of other parts of the manuscript. I’m need a new scene for plot purposes, but it will also affect the way the relationship between two characters plays out over the next five chapters, for instance. In that case, I’ll probably start fiddling with that first, with occasional breaks to do some of the easier things that I am very sure won’t be affected by the change.
The other thing to remember about revising is that, like research and prewriting, it can become infinite if you let it. Making it perfect is not possible. If you have trouble cutting yourself off, one of the best tricks I know of is to start thinking about my next story. Shortly after, I will get frustrated with having to still work on the old thing, and it won’t be long before I declare it finished and dive into the new project.
One thing I did with my first several novels was to write something else – a short story, the start of the next novel, something – after finishing the last one. That way my narrative wasn’t still in the front of my head when I did revisions, and I could more easily see anything I’d done wrong or left out.
With my first novel, the first major revision I made was something I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere. At the end I’ve got my viewpoint character and his love interest together – but I realized that over the course of the novel, I’d had her make a mistake that hurt him.
That was fine…except over the long term, it put him in the position of having the moral high ground in the relationship. That’s not healthy; even if he never asserted it, she’d know it was there.
So I went back and added a scene where he screwed up and hurt *himself* in a similar sort of way. Not only did that add some dramatic unity with her later mistake, but it made them even, especially as far as he was concerned.
I felt so much better about it after I made that revision.
Writing’s a lot of work, but fun too.
I’m just starting the editing process on a story I’ve been working on in spurts for over 3 years. Over the last couple days I read through it and put asterisks in the margins next to minor edits that need to be made, like changing a word or filling in a name I’d left blank. I also have a list of things I want to go back and work into the story, like dropping hints that one character has magical powers so they don’t come out of the blue when she uses them to help the MC.
With my first novel I found that my process included going back to the beginning of the unfinished draft, rewrite/revise up to where the unfinished draft broke off, and then push on from there. Sometimes I go back to the beginning just once, more often I do so twice, and sometimes three times before I reach the point of writing “The End.”
I want to call this a “rolling revision” but Our Gracious Hostess seems to use that term mostly or entirely for a different sort of going back to a previously written part of the current draft. (And I do that too, for relatively minor things. E.g. “No, my protagonist would not have fought a (first blood) sword duel with antagonist X back then, with B as X’s second, but instead would have dueled B, with X as B’s second. So I’ll go back & rewrite that scene to make that change before pressing onward.”)
Just finished a first draft. I had known where the characters were going, but I hadn’t realized that some of it was off-stage and not even denouement.
Let’s hear it for sequels. Even the prospect gives me strength.