I wish I’d known…Revisions

Among the many things I wish someone had talked to me about back when I was first getting started were revisions. Not so much the how-to part – like writing, that tends to be specific to the combination of writer-plus-editor-plus-book. What I really wish I’d had were a) reassurance that the problems I had and the things I did to solve them were normal, and b) a few tips about how to give my editor what she wanted.

This has been on my mind because I just finished the revisions for The Dark Lord’s Daughter (no, I don’t have a publication date yet). So this is some of what I wish I had known when I was getting started.

When I sold my first novel, I had two different ideas of what the editorial revisions might look like. On the one hand, I thought I might be asked for major plot changes that would force me to rewrite whole sections of the book or add entire scenes; on the other, I thought I might get picky comments about my phrasing, word choice, grammar and so on that would need me to review most of the manuscript, line by line.

I got both kinds.

What I hadn’t realized was that a really good editor (and I had one) doesn’t provide you with a step-by-step recipe for fixing things. They don’t say “Change these three lines in this scene in this way” they say “Wouldn’t this character worry more about her father in this chapter?” They don’t draw big Xs through paragraphs and scenes; they say “I think this section needs tightening” or “The pace slowed down in this chapter.” And they are very prone to saying short things like “Why him? Why now?” that make you realize there’s a whole bunch of information that never got onto the page that you have to go back through the story and plant in a bunch of different places.

I also didn’t realize that editors are just as prone to misinterpreting things as any other reader. The nature of misinterpretation, however, means that sometimes they ask for things that seem totally wrong-headed, like having George flirt with Jenny … because they missed the one sentence where you said that George and Jenny are brother and sister (or, worse, you never did mention that particular bit of background).

In other words, most of the time editors don’t tell you how to fix a problem; they just point the problem out and say, “Fix this.” This means that you have to decide for yourself whether a particular fix means changing a couple of words, rewriting a paragraph, inserting a scene, dropping back two chapters to put in more setup, etc. And it isn’t always obvious what the proper fix is.

For example, when I got the editorial request for “Mairelon the Magician,” the editor wanted more tension in the final scene, when the main character wasn’t sure where she’d be going now that the main mystery had been solved. The editor also wanted more of the dark parts of the main character’s background at least hinted at. When I looked at the request, it was perfectly clear to me that in order to add tension in the final scene, I’d have to do a serious rewrite of the whole thing. To add the background the way she wanted, I thought I needed an infodump-like scene and then maybe a couple of mentions during later parts of the story.

Since I wasn’t quite sure how to accomplish the tension, I started with the background. I began reading from the start, looking for a place to put my infodump. Every so often, I found a spot where I could add a few lines of dialog that gave away some of the darker and hairier parts of the heroine’s background. About three-quarters of the way through the story, it dawned on me that I’d put in quite a few of those bits, and as a result I might not need a whole info-dump-ish scene.

So I read through the book again and punched up a couple of the glimpses. And when I got to the final scene, which I still hadn’t changed, it had plenty of tension because all those little background bits had made it clear that the heroine’s alternatives were terrible. I think I may have changed one line, but I certainly didn’t rewrite the scene.

My point is that I initially completely misjudged how I was going to get to the kind of changes the editor wanted. (I think I would have preferred to write a couple of scenes, actually; going through a whole novel and adding bits here and there means you also have to double-check consistency – you don’t want a character responding with surprise to a mention of something that has already come up in an earlier conversation (due to the changes). The other thing I wish someone had suggested, back when, is a “fix list” – a list of the kinds of problematic little things I tend to do over and over, book after book.

Mostly, these are small-seeming things, like over-using semi-colons (17 on one manuscript page is too many!), or over-explaining, or particular turns of phrase (“managed to” and “was able to” are automatic search-and-destroy phrases for me in a final manuscript). The words and actions I over-use usually vary from book to book – in one, everyone will be blinking in surprise, while in the next, all the characters will be rolling their eyes, and the one after that everyone will be “demanding” rather than asking or challenging someone. There are a couple of problematic larger things, too – usually involving not getting important scenes or information down on the page, because I know it so well and it seems so obvious. By this time, I’ve figured out what a lot of them are, but it took making up a “final manuscript checklist” to get me to remember to check for and fix all of them … and my editors are still finding plenty enough new ones to keep me busy.

On December 16, 2020   /   Writing  

Tags: revising