Getting back on the horse

Writers are highly distractable people. In part, this is because it always looks like more fun to chase the cool new story idea than to slog through the miserable middle of whatever one is currently writing. (Okay, it doesn’t just look like more fun…) In part, it’s because we are attracted to shiny. And in part, it’s because chasing the new one allows procrastination on the old one without feeling “I should be writing” guilt. (Because I am writing…just not the thing I’m supposed to be finishing. It’s still writing, though!)

In extreme cases, this results in a plethora of incomplete projects, ranging from a collection of related scenes to outlines that only hang together because of “and-then-a-miracle-occurs” plotting to large chunks of story that lack connection, all the way to complete drafts that clearly need a lot more work to be saleable, but hey, they’re done.

Sometimes, though, a story gets abandoned at some stage, not out of procrastination or distraction, but because a different opportunity arises that requires a quick switch in projects (I am not turning down the invitation to write for that high-profile anthology, even if it means switching projects in mid-stream), or because the writer realizes on some level that they don’t have the chops to do whatever needs to get done yet.

The current story has to be left to marinate for a while, until the writer has time and/or has acquired the necessary skill. Either way, “marinate for a while” often means a lapse of months or years before the writer comes back to it. And while writers are frequently advised to let a story “go cold” before attempting to revise, this kind of time lag can feel less like a story “gone cold” and more like a story “dropped to absolute zero.”

In my experience, it’s actually easier to pick up a story that’s been left unfinished for a while than it is to pick up a draft that never got its proper final revision. With an unfinished story, I have to read over what I’ve done, and my notes, and think about where I now want it to go (as opposed to where I thought it was headed when I dropped it). I make a quick pass through the early part of the story, making word-tweaks and noting places I think need work, and then I’m on to producing new material. If I’m having a lot of trouble getting going, I will read and then erase (OK, use cut-and-paste to transfer to an emergency-retrieval file) the last scene of the existing draft, and rewrite it to get myself going again.

With a finished draft, the erase-and-rewrite technique doesn’t work. There’s this entire large object that needs reworking, and that can be intimidating, especially for a writer who either hasn’t had a lot of experience doing second/third/etc. drafts, or who has the experience but hates revising. (In the latter case, the hatred of revising is sometimes the real reason for leaving the story to marinate.)

My approach to revisions is, first, to look at how much revision I think is really necessary. For an older project, this involves a simple re-read. This means reading without trying to figure out where and how to put in the stuff I vaguely remember thinking it would need, back when I was last writing it. Just re-read.

At least half the time, many of the things I remember as likely to require big new scenes end up actually only needing a line here or there, but I tend not to notice that if I’m reading with an eye to putting in all the stuff I thought I was going to have to do.

When I’m done with the re-read, I decide what kind of revisions I’m actually going to need. Sometimes, the lapse in time makes me wonder why I thought the characterization was a problem at all; other times, I notice pacing problems or plot holes that I hadn’t been aware of in the heat of first-draft.

Then I start working on the easy/obvious stuff. Word tweaks and rephrasing, attacking clumsy sentences, adding a paragraph or two here and there to clarify something or punch up something. I move on to the middling-difficult changes, which are usually at the paragraph-to-scene level, or occasionally involve moving scenes around and then fiddling with the transitions to allow for their new position (i.e., making sure Robert doesn’t mention that letter from Edna if I moved the Edna-writing-the-letter scene to later in the story). Sometimes this stage means writing a whole new scene, or a large chunk of a scene.

I finish with the things I think are going to be particularly hard or tricky. This usually means things like pacing or characterization, because those are not pinpoint changes. They need to be worked in throughout the story, so they affect a lot of different sentences, paragraphs, and scenes.

I do it this way because experience has shown me that if I know that I am going to need to speed up the pacing, and I’m leaving that for last, my backbrain will keep that in mind while I’m doing all the things I think are small, easy changes, and I will then have a lot less pain when it comes to making the “hard” revisions. In one memorable case, by the time I finished all the easy stuff, the hardest and most impossible bit turned out to be entirely unnecessary, because the emotional balance of the story had already shifted to where it needed to be.

However one chooses to approach getting back on the specific horse, the main thing is to get started. Sitting around worrying about it only makes it harder to get going.