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
Read more →Seat-of-the-pants writers whose work quickly sets up like concrete face some unique problems with revising.
Read more →The Internal Critic, aka Internal Editor, is the part of your brain that points out every single thing that is wrong with whatever you are doing (whether that’s writing or making a fancy dinner for your in-laws), brings up the obvious impossibility of whatever giant task you
Read more →There are two sorts of outlines that writers do: submission outlines and planning outlines. A submission outline is my term for the one you send to the agent or publisher in hopes of selling the book. A planning outline, on the other hand, is a writing tool.
Read more →One of the reasons I spent the last two posts on the process part of revision is that I believe that understanding your process saves enormous amounts of time in the long run. Specifically, having some idea how your first-draft process works and what exactly you’re trying
Read more →Writers go about doing revisions in different ways, depending on the what and why of the revisions and on the writer’s personal best process for them. As always, there is no One True Way; if what you are currently doing isn’t working, try something else. The only
Read more →Fixing a broken manuscript comes under the general heading of “revisions,” and since I haven’t talked about revising for a while, and since I’m in the middle of doing some in the current WIP, this seems like a good time to go over them. There are three
Read more →When most people think about revising a manuscript, they think about one of two things: polishing up the style, grammar, syntax, and so on, or making fixes where something was unclear, unexplained, or just missing. Revising does all of that, of course, but in addition, there’s almost
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