Artifice of Power Update #4

Sorry for the late update! I normally try to schedule these to release first thing Saturday morning and was a bit busy last night. This week I met my word count goal, but identified a core problem with my early chapters and how they were setting up the arc of the book. As a result, Most of my word count went into revision and rewriting of the early chapters. I restructured chapters one through nine through the course of this week and am currently working on chapter ten. Since I left off forward progress at chapter 13, that’s pretty good and won’t set me back too much.

A quick note on revising while writing

Most authors will tell you that trying to revise a book while you’re writing it is the wrong decision. It tends to get you stuck in revision hell and you never quite finish the draft. As a rule, I agree with this sentiment, and despite that, I just spent a week shutting down forward progress on my draft and revising. However, I find that there are two types of revision for me, which have wildly different impacts on my ability to keep writing. The first is what many non-authors think of when they talk about revision, and what the above advice almost always applies to: tweaking line-level writing, adjusting word counts, adjusting small elements of a scene or chapter to make it hit better, etc. This type of revision is something I can only do after I have a draft done or I will never finish.

The other type, though, is what authors often call developmental editing: moving entire chapters around and changing the direction of a plot arc entirely, or re-imagining a character’s motivations so that everything they do through the entire book is slightly (or not so slightly) different. I have found that, in my process as an extreme discovery writer, if I let those types of elements just sit, the entire book goes off the rails and I have to start over from scratch. Not entirely from scratch, of course (I often still pull some content from the old work), but mostly. This is because the past of the book impacts how my brain crafts the future of the book–I naturally draw inspiration from events that I already wrote and incorporate them into the book going forward. If I’m going to add something and haven’t yet, then I can’t draw from it, and if I’m going to remove something, I better get it removed or I’m likely to keep weaving it further into the book as I write.

This second type of revision isn’t universally okay to do while writing, though. Many other authors can’t do even this type of revision while writing without getting stuck in editing instead of drafting. For those writers, they make notes about what changes they plan to make and then go back in and make the adjustments in revisions. I marvel at their ability to so precisely make only the edits they need and not end up changing half the book by just changing one small thing. Sometimes, being this type of discovery writer sucks.

But it’s magical, also. See you next week!