Revisions.
For some writers, they’re impossible. For other writers, they’re a potentially endless attempt to coerce their story into an impossible perfection. For still others, they’re the easy part (or at least, the easier part, better than coming up with a first draft.
Like everything else in writing, one can split revisions up into multiple different categories, depending on the writer, their process, the type of problems the writer has, the stage at which revising starts, how extensive the changes need to be, and so on.
Possibly the most obvious way of categorizing revisions is according to the length of a single change. Adding or deleting an entire scene or chapter is usually a lot more time-and-energy consuming than adding or deleting a couple of words in a single sentence. The problem is that it’s never really a single sentence—making micro-changes in phrasing at the sentence level means you’re going through the entire book, a sentence at a time. Micro-changes are not actually a small or a short process, if you’re going over an 80,000-word manuscript.
Still, thinking of revisions in terms of sections of text that need attention can be really useful. There’s no point in sweating over every sentence or awkward phrase in a chapter that needs to be deleted in its entirety.
Therefore, I usually start by doing a sort of mental organization of the revisions that I, my crit group, my beta readers, and my editors and agent think are necessary. There are always some that are quick, easy, and obvious—I changed a character’s name from Anthony to Andrew after two chapters, or left a sentence only half-complete by accident. There are others that won’t be quite as easy—a reference or a paragraph that I have to plant somewhere (or mention more than once) so that there’ll be a gun on the mantlepiece for the readers to remember when the burglar grabs it in Chapter 18.
And there are the major changes: adding or deleting entire scenes, chapters, subplots, or plot twists (all of which always require changes around the addition/deletion in order to make it flow), or moving a scene to a more logical point in the timeline (no, I don’t want Ricardo’s explanation of Joyce’s actions to come before she actually does any of them…and the encounter with the taxi driver just makes more sense if it happens two chapters sooner…and the emotional buildup works better if Miki argues with her aunt first and then goes out back to sulk).
Major changes to the text always require additional work to make them fit. I am always, always very reluctant to make them, especially when I’m the one who thinks they’re needed. Tearing up five or fourteen chapters and rearranging everything, dropping some bits and revising or rearranging others, is a huge lot of work. I’d much rather get it right on the first try, but that’s a pipe dream. Nothing is perfect on the first try; nothing is ever going to be truly perfect, no matter how long I work on it. One has to decide where the story crosses the line from “no way am I sending this out” to “it’s the best I can do right now; time to move on to the next thing.” When I’m the one who thinks something’s wrong, I won’t be happy unless I fix it to my own satisfaction. I know that, so eventually, that’s what I do (grumbling all the way).
In my experience, revisions are always worth doing. I learn something from doing them, every time. There comes a point, however, when I realize that I will learn more from writing something new than I will from revising (again) something I’ve already written (and usually gone over more than once).
I learned that when my first novel sold—by then, I’d written an entire second book, and had improved my writing skills considerably due to all that practice. One of my friends urged me to rewrite the entire novel to bring it up to the level I had reached at that point. I thought about it as I made all the changes the editor had requested, and after a couple of weeks I decided that a) the book had sold as it was, and I didn’t want to accidentally erase whatever the editor had liked about it, b) I might be a better writer than I’d been when I wrote that first book, but I wasn’t enough better to justify a full-blown rewrite that the editor hadn’t asked for, and c) in order to get enough better, I needed to write something new, not continue polishing my first novel.
My third novel was the one where I learned the value of that whole-novel sentence-by-sentence revising pass. I’d been asked to make a significant reduction in word count to an unsold manuscript. After a week or so of staring at it, I couldn’t find a single scene that I could just cut—they all had plot-related information that I’d have to add back in order for the plot to make sense. So I divided the words-to-be-cut by the number of pages in the manuscript, and set myself to cut three lines out of each manuscript page.
It took three weeks, two-to-four hours every day, but I learned an enormous amount about compact phrasing, spotting redundancies, and some of my stylistic tics. I cut over 5,000 words, mostly a phrase or a sentence at a time. I remember it as being brutal, but I also remember being much, much happier with the resulting manuscript (and I’d been quite pleased with it even before the editor asked for the cuts).
Easy or hard, they’re the best way to learn where your strengths and weaknesses lie, so you can appreciate the one and work on the other.
Not that I enjoy them, either…
Heh. Just like going through missed math problems to see what went wrong. Fortunately, I haven’t yet had to chop out an entire scene–though the current WIP had to be re-written almost completely after I finished it the first time round, and the back half is nowhere near the same anymore.
I’ve had to chop scenes.
I’ve had to chop scenes that did something for the story but not enough to justify their length, even.
My first novel – completed, not attempted – I whacked a whole scene from late in the story and then wrote a new one much earlier. I’d realized that, in call-it-moral terms, I’d created an imbalance between my two main protagonists, and did that significant revision to fix it.
You do what you have to…
I did a word-count reduction for a novel and had the same experience: you get really familiar with your own characteristic tics, wordiness, and repetition. An education in streamlining.
Rick
Gorey’s illustrated novel _The Unstrung Harp: Or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel_ captures the moment:
“Some weeks later, with pen, ink, scissors, paste, a decanter of sherry, and a vast reluctance, Mr Earbrass began to revise TUH [The Unstrung Harp, his WIP]. This means, first, transposing passages, or reversing the order of their paragraphs, or crumpling them up furiously and throwing them in the waste-basket. After that there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones. Before Mr Earbrass is through, at least one third of TUH will bear no resemblance to its original state.”
I am at least very grateful that word processors mean we don’t need the scissors and paste anymore.
And then there are those who swear by writing the initial manuscript in longhand. (On paper with a fountain pen, even.) I’m not one of those. I’m far on the keyboard end of the stylus-keyboard continuum, and would swear AT the idea of writing a manuscript in longhand. But I’ve heard of people who are my opposite number in that regard.
Touch typing. “Personal typing” was the most useful practical high school class EVAR.
I too am so glad I learned to type in school.
I started out in longhand on legal pads for the first draft, then typing them on a typewriter. Eventually word processors got invented, and eventually were affordable and practical, so I switched to that approach.
But for a while I still would print out the first draft and revise on paper. Eventually I got to where I worked softcopy only, fortunately.
(I’m old.)
My revisions have always increased the word count. The year-plus revision of the WIP, back when I had a bit more than half a first draft, increased the word count by about 15,000 words. I tell myself that if I needed to do a “cut the word count” revision, I could, but there’s a part of me that issues dire warnings that doing so would be much harder than expected.
Revisions have been getting harder for me in general. I think it’s because I’m getting better at seeing what needs to be fixed.
I grew up on omit needless words writing advice and to this day, give my betas fits over how excessively spare my prose can get. Any good revision of my work results in adding in missing context, description, explanatory material, and a lot of words. Turns out I was always in the minority who underwrote by default, so practicing cutting word count was actually a serious flaw in my writing I’ve been trying lately to undo.
This is a perfect example of why I rant against a lot of the popular generic writing advice. I’ve had people who have never read a single word of my writing tell me “Okay, now you just have to cut 20%” of a just-finished novel, or “You probably need to delete the first three chapters.” Uh, I’m a chronic under-writer, and I tend to start either in medias res or about one breath before the action kicks off; generally the last thing I need to do is cut stuff.
I like to think there’s a special kind of duct tape in Hell for the mouths of people who hand out writing commandments to people whose work they haven’t read. 😉
Isn’t there some nice dental surgery I could have instead of doing revisions?
Adding or deleting an entire scene or chapter is usually a lot more time-and-energy consuming than adding or deleting a couple of words in a single sentence.
For me, it’s the other way around. Adding a scene generally isn’t too bad, assuming I understand what it needs to do and especially if I’m sliding it in where there’s a scene break anyway. I just have to make sure it flows in and out okay, and that’s what scene breaks are for, to make that easier. Changing an existing sentence is HARD. I have to persuade the existing text to make room for this interloper; I might even have to remove something that’s already there, oh horrors! I have been known to spend an entire day’s writing time on forcing a needed change of a single phrase (and sometimes putting it back at the end). It’s not always that bad, and I think I’ve gotten better at it over time, but in some cases, would rather write an entire other story than alter a sentence or three.