Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "revisions"
First Drafts: The Elaborate Excuses
Dear Blog,
I’m not just writing a New First Draft because I am too lazy to revise my spy story. I swear it is not because writing a New First Draft is more fun than struggling to turn a finished draft into something more like a finished book. It is totally not because I have no idea what to do with my finished draft in order to pull it all together and make it something other people might enjoy reading.
Nope. This is my process. (She says, pompously, with shifty eyes that might make you suspicious, if you were that sort of blog . But you aren’t that sort of blog, are you? You believe me, don’t you?).
This plunging on ahead with first-drafting is pretty much how I wrote the Tian Di trilogy. I wrote a draft of the first book. I gave it a quick once-over, sort of like checking for lice and removing extraneous limbs (as one does). Then I wrote a draft of book 2. I revised book 1 a little more – the book-equivalent of combing its hair and giving it a dash of make-up. A gentle snipping and clipping and smoothing of book 2, and then I wrote a draft of book 3. With the trilogy all drafted, I went back into book 1 with a machete and remade it. Got book 2 a new outfit and a dashing haircut. More book 1, ruthlessly. Blow-torching, blood everywhere. A bit of revision on book 3, all kindness here at the beginning of the process: you’re not so bad as you are, just a little touch-up honey, don’t look over there, those aren’t book 1’s guts on the floor, I promise, just don’t look, here, put this in your mouth and bite down if it hurts. Back to book 1, for repairs and rehabilitation, until it looked (and felt!) whole. Then I sent book 1 out into the world, to find itself a home, which it did, at Coteau Books. More blood-and-guts revisions on book 2, between other projects. It is ready for the editor’s knife. And I just finished a rewrite of book 3, but it needs another go-over or five. It also needs to simmer a while. Like soup. Add some ingredients, take out some ingredients (that’s how you make soup, right?). Let it simmer for a year while you make another batch of different soup.
(Why are makeovers, torture and soup-making the best metaphors I can come up with for book-making? I have only ever tried one of those three things, and don’t do it well – I will leave it to you, blog, to guess which).
I am impressed by and curious about authors who write the first book in a series and get it published (or submit it for publication, if they are new authors) before they have written the next book(s). Maybe I just don’t have that much faith in myself. I’m so afraid of writing myself into a corner. I didn’t want the process of writing the third Tian Di book to be bound by unchangeable events or rules from the first. My most substantial rewrites on the first came after drafting the third, and a big part of the fun, then, was in laying tiny clues for what was to come later.
So I am writing a New First Draft… OK, because I am lazy, because it’s fun, because I’m not sure what to do now with my spy story, fine … but I think and hope that more first-drafting will actually help me with the revisions. I’ll learn my characters and their world even more. It’s part of my process. Quit looking at me like that.
Yours, lazy-as-all-get-out and a rotten soup-maker to boot,
Catherine
I’m not just writing a New First Draft because I am too lazy to revise my spy story. I swear it is not because writing a New First Draft is more fun than struggling to turn a finished draft into something more like a finished book. It is totally not because I have no idea what to do with my finished draft in order to pull it all together and make it something other people might enjoy reading.
Nope. This is my process. (She says, pompously, with shifty eyes that might make you suspicious, if you were that sort of blog . But you aren’t that sort of blog, are you? You believe me, don’t you?).
This plunging on ahead with first-drafting is pretty much how I wrote the Tian Di trilogy. I wrote a draft of the first book. I gave it a quick once-over, sort of like checking for lice and removing extraneous limbs (as one does). Then I wrote a draft of book 2. I revised book 1 a little more – the book-equivalent of combing its hair and giving it a dash of make-up. A gentle snipping and clipping and smoothing of book 2, and then I wrote a draft of book 3. With the trilogy all drafted, I went back into book 1 with a machete and remade it. Got book 2 a new outfit and a dashing haircut. More book 1, ruthlessly. Blow-torching, blood everywhere. A bit of revision on book 3, all kindness here at the beginning of the process: you’re not so bad as you are, just a little touch-up honey, don’t look over there, those aren’t book 1’s guts on the floor, I promise, just don’t look, here, put this in your mouth and bite down if it hurts. Back to book 1, for repairs and rehabilitation, until it looked (and felt!) whole. Then I sent book 1 out into the world, to find itself a home, which it did, at Coteau Books. More blood-and-guts revisions on book 2, between other projects. It is ready for the editor’s knife. And I just finished a rewrite of book 3, but it needs another go-over or five. It also needs to simmer a while. Like soup. Add some ingredients, take out some ingredients (that’s how you make soup, right?). Let it simmer for a year while you make another batch of different soup.
(Why are makeovers, torture and soup-making the best metaphors I can come up with for book-making? I have only ever tried one of those three things, and don’t do it well – I will leave it to you, blog, to guess which).
I am impressed by and curious about authors who write the first book in a series and get it published (or submit it for publication, if they are new authors) before they have written the next book(s). Maybe I just don’t have that much faith in myself. I’m so afraid of writing myself into a corner. I didn’t want the process of writing the third Tian Di book to be bound by unchangeable events or rules from the first. My most substantial rewrites on the first came after drafting the third, and a big part of the fun, then, was in laying tiny clues for what was to come later.
So I am writing a New First Draft… OK, because I am lazy, because it’s fun, because I’m not sure what to do now with my spy story, fine … but I think and hope that more first-drafting will actually help me with the revisions. I’ll learn my characters and their world even more. It’s part of my process. Quit looking at me like that.
Yours, lazy-as-all-get-out and a rotten soup-maker to boot,
Catherine
Revisions, Love, and being In It For The Long Haul
Dear Blog,
It’s time to abandon my fun, scraggly, unfinished draft for final (!!!) revisions of The Last Days of Tian Di book 2 (currently Unmaking, but we’ll see if that title sticks), and I am feeling all dramatic about it. Can I be a drama queen, in my blog? Where better to be a drama queen? Who else would put up with it as patiently as you, blog?
If a first draft is like falling in love, as I suggested here, the revision process is like going through several traumatic divorces and remarriages with the same person while trying to settle down and build that perfect, happy union. Staying in love is so much harder than falling in love, and takes longer too.
Revisions are moving beyond the infatuation stage, and now you are staring at the little hairs he didn’t clean out of the sink after trimming his beard. Revisions are getting stuck halfway up the stairs, looking at him over the sofa you are trying to move into your new apartment, the sofa you can’t really afford, and thinking, oh god, is this a terrible mistake? Revisions are moving to New Jersey after years of gallivanting around the world in that reckless, spontaneous, first-drafty way, making Long Term Plans now and Serious Commitments, while every evening you secretly go and look at airfares on-line, trying to pretend that anything is still possible. Revisions are failing to grow a vegetable garden, kneeling in the dirt trying not to cry over the stunted, barely edible, and too-symbolic carrots and radishes that you’ve pulled up out of the earth.
You do it for love, you are looking for the plot, for the thread that will hold it all together, but it was so much easier before, when your only goal was something new and the future didn’t matter. You are trying to build something that will last, but you are thinking about how free you were when you didn’t owe your heart to this attempt.
Revisions are working through it, the days when you fantasize about Some Other Life, Not This One – an early morning train, days that are yours alone, a sleek black cat with iridescent green eyes watching you from the wall in the courtyard. You stay, every day, you stay anyway. You rewrite it, you rewrite it. The following summer, the garden will flourish. You’ll come back with tender ripe squash and zucchini, handfuls of basil, bags of crisp beans, because you’ve learned what to grow in this earth. In the early evening, the fireflies will rise up in semi-synchronized masses, bright blinking lights filling the lawn outside, and you’ll be glad you are here, for the first time not secretly plotting your escape. You can almost see it, the thing you’re trying to make.
The thing you end up with is never as perfect as the thing you imagined when you had really barely started, when he made you laugh so hard in that cave covered in batshit in Malaysia. It’s never as perfect as all those other lives you won’t live and the books you won’t write. The black cat eyes you resentfully in your dreams, like it is sneering at you, Really, is that all you can do? But that cat is just pissed off because it isn’t real. Dumb imaginary cat.
Whatever. I have had some practice at this now. I know all about being disappointed in myself. I could teach a master class on self-loathing, blog. But it is worth it, every time it is worth it, either for what you make, or for what you learn about how to make something. Revisions, like love, have never not been worth it.
So I’m suiting up. Once more into the breach, or something. Tian Di, book 2, you’re going to wish you’d never met me.
Melodramatically, imaginary-machete-wieldingly yours,
Catherine
It’s time to abandon my fun, scraggly, unfinished draft for final (!!!) revisions of The Last Days of Tian Di book 2 (currently Unmaking, but we’ll see if that title sticks), and I am feeling all dramatic about it. Can I be a drama queen, in my blog? Where better to be a drama queen? Who else would put up with it as patiently as you, blog?
If a first draft is like falling in love, as I suggested here, the revision process is like going through several traumatic divorces and remarriages with the same person while trying to settle down and build that perfect, happy union. Staying in love is so much harder than falling in love, and takes longer too.
Revisions are moving beyond the infatuation stage, and now you are staring at the little hairs he didn’t clean out of the sink after trimming his beard. Revisions are getting stuck halfway up the stairs, looking at him over the sofa you are trying to move into your new apartment, the sofa you can’t really afford, and thinking, oh god, is this a terrible mistake? Revisions are moving to New Jersey after years of gallivanting around the world in that reckless, spontaneous, first-drafty way, making Long Term Plans now and Serious Commitments, while every evening you secretly go and look at airfares on-line, trying to pretend that anything is still possible. Revisions are failing to grow a vegetable garden, kneeling in the dirt trying not to cry over the stunted, barely edible, and too-symbolic carrots and radishes that you’ve pulled up out of the earth.
You do it for love, you are looking for the plot, for the thread that will hold it all together, but it was so much easier before, when your only goal was something new and the future didn’t matter. You are trying to build something that will last, but you are thinking about how free you were when you didn’t owe your heart to this attempt.
Revisions are working through it, the days when you fantasize about Some Other Life, Not This One – an early morning train, days that are yours alone, a sleek black cat with iridescent green eyes watching you from the wall in the courtyard. You stay, every day, you stay anyway. You rewrite it, you rewrite it. The following summer, the garden will flourish. You’ll come back with tender ripe squash and zucchini, handfuls of basil, bags of crisp beans, because you’ve learned what to grow in this earth. In the early evening, the fireflies will rise up in semi-synchronized masses, bright blinking lights filling the lawn outside, and you’ll be glad you are here, for the first time not secretly plotting your escape. You can almost see it, the thing you’re trying to make.
The thing you end up with is never as perfect as the thing you imagined when you had really barely started, when he made you laugh so hard in that cave covered in batshit in Malaysia. It’s never as perfect as all those other lives you won’t live and the books you won’t write. The black cat eyes you resentfully in your dreams, like it is sneering at you, Really, is that all you can do? But that cat is just pissed off because it isn’t real. Dumb imaginary cat.
Whatever. I have had some practice at this now. I know all about being disappointed in myself. I could teach a master class on self-loathing, blog. But it is worth it, every time it is worth it, either for what you make, or for what you learn about how to make something. Revisions, like love, have never not been worth it.
So I’m suiting up. Once more into the breach, or something. Tian Di, book 2, you’re going to wish you’d never met me.
Melodramatically, imaginary-machete-wieldingly yours,
Catherine
