Rolling along

“Rolling revising” is a writing term that I think is fairly clear, but I’ll take a whack at a quick definition: Instead of writing a complete first draft from start to finish, the writer periodically goes back over already-written parts and revises them before continuing, even though they’re only partway through the first draft.

There are two main difficulties with rolling revisions. The first is that some/many writers get bogged down in the revisions and never do get around to finishing the draft, which is totally counter-productive (Zeno’s paradox definitely applies to writers, even if it doesn’t actually work in the real world for Achilles and the tortoise). As a result, lots of writing advice cautions against even trying rolling revisions, in an attempt to avoid the getting-bogged-down problem.

The second is that some writers are best off with a drafting technique that doesn’t involve start-to-finish writing at all, but something more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. This requires loads of revising, but it’s not exactly a rolling revision, and treating it as such can cause a different set of difficulties – namely, trying to get to a first draft too quickly, which is the equivalent of trying to force jigsaw pieces to fit together when they don’t, quite. Again, the typical advice is to not try this.

The thing is, I have been a rolling reviser since I started writing, and it has worked for me for forty-some years. I used to start writing my first draft at the beginning and progress until I realized that the brilliant idea I just had would have to be planted a chapter or a scene or multiple chapters/scenes earlier. Instead of merely noting that fact, I went back and rewrote the earlier scene (and then any that came after it that the revision had affected). I have always needed to know the foundation I am using is solid before my backbrain will let me make progress.

Naturally, the farther back I had to go and the larger the change was, the more stuff had to be rewritten/revised. I am therefore happiest when I catch on to the need to revise sooner, rather than later. To facilitate this, I gradually got in the habit of dropping back two to four manuscript pages at the start of most writing sessions to tidy things up. “Tidying up” doesn’t mean completely rewriting four pages; it means revising – adding an extra line or two of dialog here, to clarify things, rearranging a couple of sentences in that paragraph to make better sense, realizing that Character A seems to have disappeared and either giving him/her something to do or mentioning that he/she left to feed the cat. (Ideally, I also notice when I have called a character Andrew on one page and Anthony two pages later, but unfortunately, I don’t spot that sort of thing as often as I would like.)

This gets me in the zone, so to speak. However, it doesn’t work at all well if I only have fifteen minutes or so to write just then. Fifteen minutes isn’t enough to tidy up and make forward progress, so if that’s all the time I have, I work on moving things forward. Eventually, I’ll have an hour or two, or an entire morning, to work, and I’ll go back over everything. If I get totally stuck, I’ll drop back a few scenes or chapters instead of just pages, and if that doesn’t work, it usually means I have made a wrong turn somewhere. (Other writers may have other “tells” that let them know they have gone off course; it’s the sort of thing that varies from writer to writer, and can only be learned by experience.)

I still end up having the occasional need for a massive rewrite, but it’s less frequent when I do this kind of repeated rolling mini-revision. The other thing I try to do is to notice what sorts of things I end up fixing repeatedly. This helps two ways: first, when I am writing new stuff, I can try to pay a little more attention to how many semi-colons I am using, or which phrases I’m repeating, or how much interior monolog I am using/not-using, so that I won’t have so much to revise later. Second, when I am revising, I have a mental (or sometimes physical) list of things to check.

The exact list varies from book to book, but the types of revisions remain fairly consistent:

1. The obvious mistakes. The places where I have misspelled a word, accidentally double-up a word or phrase or sentence, left out a quotation mark, etc. These are no-brainers.
2. Minor decisions. These are places where I have seventeen semi-colons on one page, or have five different characters roll their eyes, or use the same colorful phrasing too often. It also applies to basic writerly problems, like relying too much on adverbs and/or adjectives. Much of the time, one or two of these will be fine; five or seventeen of them is too many. So I have to decide which ones to keep and which ones go. I don’t spend a lot of time agonizing about these; I’ll have another few passes to change my mind about them, after all.
3. Larger changes. Sometimes I look at a conversation and realize that it’s happening in the wrong order, or that there’s a good spot to put a particular new comment I want to get in. Or that my viewpoint character is doing nothing but watching/listening and has no internal reactions to anything (and if the viewpoint character isn’t interested, why should the reader be?). Sometimes things just seem to be taking too long.
4. Completely new stuff. Sometimes, looking at yesterday’s work gives me a better idea. This can result in deleting and replacing half a scene, or in chopping a scene in half and inserting one or more entire new scenes in the gap. This is usually the limit of what I’d classify as part of “rolling revisions” – if I’m doing more than this, I call it an actual rewrite.

The important thing about rolling revisions is to make absolutely sure that, whatever method one uses, one continues to make forward progress on the story. Again, it’s a matter of personal experience how much and how frequently. For some writers, daily progress is a given; for others, a nice big burst of new words every other week or once a month is comfortable. Others do their rolling revisions in randomly available ten-to-fifteen-minute chunks, and save their daily or weekly hour-plus writing sessions entirely for new words (which is the opposite of how I often do it). And some just mix it up depending on how they feel. It’s the results that matter. If there are lots of words getting written, but the page count never moves, something is wrong.