Revising

[msagara]

domynoe wrote:

You know, I would love a ramble on your revision process the revision process, whatever you want to call it, as this is where I seem to be having the most problems. I've done the "easy stuff" and am now into the nit picky, line by line stuff and it's driving me crazy that it seems to be going so slow. I just feel like I'm not getting a handle on it, and now that I know how to finally come up with w rough draft (meaning, knowing how I need to write to come up with that draft), if anything is going to kill any kind of publication schedule, it's going to be the revisions.

I could do this; I'm even going to try, but. (There's always a but).


Bookstores, publishing as an industry, even the process of dealing with agents & editors are all things that, although each bookstore, publisher, agent and editor are individual, still have a lot in common, and it's much easier in those cases to generalize and at the same time offer useful information.

But because no two writers I've ever met work the exact same way, anything I said about revising would be entirely subjective -- one person's way of doing things, no more. I would never tell anyone else that they should approach revisions the way I do, because it's unlikely to work.

Realizing that you're struggling with the revision process, though, I'll say a couple of things -- and then ask others to fill in with their own processes (no, andpuff, not you <g>).

While each author does write in his or her own way, there are some broad generalizations that I'll make -- and please note, they are broad, so if they're of no use to you, or anyone else who's reading, ignore them.

My first draft and my submission draft are actually fairly similar, and always have been. I'm a 'throw it all out and start from scratch if it needs too much structural work' writer, and I tend to spend time on the first draft, line-editing sentences as I go. This means that the 'first' draft will be more polished. I tend to write in the evening, and then reread what I wrote the next day, when I'll do my first line-edit of raw text; I then move on in the novel. I do this one step forward, one step back, one step forward skip throughout the book.

When it's finished, I read it all from front to back, because at that point I know how it ends with some certainty, and I can either delete, add, or refine those things that have structural importance to the story. To give a grossly exaggerated example: If a character dies unexpectedly on me, and I want that death to have emotional freight, I begin to set up resonances earlier in the book that point toward that end. In the read-through I will also line edit again -- and this is a bitch, because changing a sentence can scrap a page or two worth of following paragraphs, meaning I have to rewrite those as well.

There are many writers who do something similar to this, and the work we send in as our first submission is pretty much what the book will look like, modulo editorial revision requests and editorial line-editing and copy-editing. Ummm, I did the bit about the different types of editing already, didn't I? (Yes, just checked; it's here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/msagara/5294.html)

However… There are a number of people who write a very, very rough first draft, and they submit something like their fourth or fifth draft, refining the novel and often cutting out chunks of it as they go. I don't know if the revision process takes longer -- I assume it must -- because it's not the way I personally work.

When it comes to revision, line editing is pretty standard, and if the line-edit is a slog, I'm not sure how to make it go faster. But if the editing needed is structural editing -- if you need to make character voices clearer, for instance, or if you need to delete -- or add -- whole plot elements in order for readers to understand key scenes later on -- this can also take time.

I'm not sure which part of the process is causing the hump, so to speak.

I know that when I first started revising for an editor, I found it very hard. Not because I didn't want to revise -- I did -- but because a lot of the time I didn't understand what she was saying. Or rather, I didn't understand the why of it. If, for instance, she told me "this character doesn't work", I would sit there and stare blankly at pages and pages of sudden confusion because, obviously, the character worked for me. I was lucky in that my first editor was very patient; she answered my questions.

Revising the first book was a revelation, to me. Throwing away what became the third and starting it from scratch was the moment in which structure, with which I'd struggled consciously, suddenly snapped into place with that bracing clarity that happens so rarely it's its own joy. In as much as throwing out an entire manuscript can ever be a joy.

Sometimes, the hard part is translating what an editor/reader means into something you can work with. "This character doesn't work" isn't helpful if you can't figure out why. As you become more confident with revision, the why will become more clear, but until then, it's a bitch. If you have a writer's workshop, if you have alpha-readers upon whom you rely, you'll already have gotten feedback. But while getting the first draft down is absolutely critical, the revision process is just as critical -- even more so. Getting the feedback you need in a form you can digest is part of the revision process.

I think what I need, to say anything of more use, is to know what the nature of the slowdown is. Are you struggling with the language? Are you at the point at which you're so damn tired of the book you can't look at the words objectively? Is it something more structural? Or is it just that you know you need to make it better, but you're not sure what constitutes that better?

Because I can't revise based on air. When I revise, I'm looking -- always -- for specific things. Language ticks. Lack of description. Dialogue infelicities. Structural mess (which is always story dependent). Inconsistencies. I don't have a general "let's make this much better" approach because -- for me -- that's so nebulous it doesn't work; I have to be able to break "better" down into subjective constituent parts first, so that I know in specific what I'm doing surgery on; if I don't know what "better" means to me, I have no idea what kind of surgery to attempt.

It's why I appreciate the editorial view -- the editorial comments give me goals, another way of looking at the book, other things to aim for.

Comments

[larryhammer]

My revision process is kinda all over, depending on how clean at both large and small scales the draft is. I do start each day by line-editing the previous day's work (or for narrative poetry, previous couple days') both because I type rather messily and to get me a running start at new stuff. I usually don't rework earlier material until the end and I know what needs reworking (except that sometimes I rework the beginning to point myself in the right direction), but instead make revision notes, subject to change as further information comes in. The End = first draft. I then read through, making noted revisions and polishing language as I go — all the things I know are wrong and know how to fix — sometimes in a couple passes. That's second draft, the one that the writers group sees.

That's more or less constant for stories, narrative poems, and now novels. When I get comments back on structural and character issues (there always are some; the always ending needs work, even when I think I've fixed it) then process diverges. I sometimes do them at once, sometimes let them simmer for weeks or months, sometimes I address language first, sometimes structural first, sometimes I need only one round and I'm done, sometimes I take it out every once in a long while and poke at before putting away with a sigh.

Needless to say, this shows I've never worked on contract for this stuff.

---L.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

sometimes I take it out every once in a long while and poke at before putting away with a sigh.

Needless to say, this shows I've never worked on contract for this stuff.

Nope <g>. Just depends on the definition of "long while". I remember for DEATH, there was -one- editorial comment out of a host of comments that I thought would be easy to fix. But it wasn't. My editor said "Gilliam doesn't seem to be upset enough." And I thought of an emotional reaction scene -- until I hit it, at which point I was stymied. I wasn't going to write another reaction; if the first one hadn't worked, it seemed pointless.

It took almost a month of doing 'nothing' before it suddenly came to me: And out of it, one of my favourite passages in the book. I realized that there was a way to echo the loss and sorrow of the culture from the first book -- and the fact that it was unexpected, here, in the Empire, added that depth of resonance that I think my editor was looking for. It wasn't his viewpoint, of course; it was the Ladies of Breodanir -- but it's their loss, in so many ways, that informs the culture he came from. "He doesn't seem upset enough" was a short form that indicated something was missing; the what came later.

I'm -so- babbling. Stopping now <g>.