Revision

A post at Patricia Wrede’s blog: Revision, revision

It’s a good post. Here’s the beginning:

Let’s deal with the “when” first. “Rolling revisions” happen during the course of drafting. Some writers start a new day’s work by revising the previous day’s work as a sort of warm-up. Other times, you get to a point where you suddenly realize that you need to make changes in a scene three chapters ago in order for what’s currently going on to work properly.

Next, there’s the major mid-story redo, where you’re halfway (or more) through the novel and you suddenly realize that chapters have to be rearranged, subplots combined or significantly altered, structure reworked, characters dropped or added, or other major alterations made that mean the whole manuscript has to be restarted from the beginning. …

I paused here. The whole thing, restarted from the beginning? Maybe it would be easier just to write something else. That was my initial reaction. Then I thought, well, I guess that’s like turning “The Ghost Trilogy” into The White Road of the Moon and Winter of Ice and Iron. That entailed starting over from the beginning, though to be fair White Road did involve straight-up cannibalization of a lot of the early part of the “The Ghost Trilogy.”

Anyway:

I’m one of those writers who starts a new day by reading over — not necessarily revising, but tweaking — some of the pages written the previous day. Not always, but usually. This kind of tweaking adds up to substantial sentence-level revision by the end, so as a rule, by the time I get to the end, the front half of a book doesn’t need as much tweaking as the back half.

I’m not sure I’ve ever significantly altered subplots. Every now and then, I introduce a character, do nothing with that character, find that his role is not developing as I thought it might, and go back to take him out of the story.

Much more often, I realize a chapter ought to be cut — the whole thing, or nearly — and as a rule I will put that off for a while, but eventually the awareness that this job is waiting gets on my nerves and I drop everything and do the cut. I think I mentioned that I hit some bit in Silver Circle where I cut the largest part of a chapter, but didn’t bother stitching the ends back together and then had to do that during primary revision. What a pain that sort of thing can be.

Like Patricia Wrede, I make a list of Things That Need Tweaking. Unlike Wrede, I don’t sort these things into categories; they just get added to a list in the order I think of them. But, again like Wrede, I do the easiest tweaks first. That means anything where it’s just adding a sentence or scattered to set something up. You do it, it’s done, you cross it off your list and move on. This is like, oh … okay, it’s like adding Marag’s mother to the back half of the novel. It’s not hard at all. Place her in a scene, give her a couple of lines. Place her in another scene, give her a couple of lines. Place her in a scene right toward the end and give her a few important lines. Half an hour, done, cross off that item and move on. I do sometimes use the strikethrough button to cross things off a list. Other times, I just delete items so I can watch the list get shorter.

The hardest things, I leave for last, just because it’s easier to tackle a big thing when you’re ALMOST FINISHED than when you’re at the beginning of revision. Hard things include tweaking a character all the way through the manuscript. Anything that involves having to do things all the way through the manuscript is by definition hard. Age a character up a bit, or down a bit. You won’t remember this, I expect, even if I’ve mentioned it, but Natividad, Alejandro, Miguel, and Ezekiel were all in their twenties in the first version. The publisher wanted me to age them down substantially, and this gave me fits later, as I kept needing to find ways to drag my feet with Natividad rather than letting her relationship with Ezekiel move forward. Anyway, the initial job of dropping her from about twenty to fifteen was one of those super-annoying jobs that I usually put off till the end.

Wrede ends her post this way:

The main thing is to find a method that will not get you bogged down and resistant. I find that starting with the easy ones builds momentum, and by the time I get to the tough stuff, it feels like “Yes, this one is bad, but then there’s only one more and I’ll be done!” (Barn door syndrome for the win.) Other writers prefer to knock off the toughest problems first and then coast through the others as things get easier and easier. Or they work on the hard problems until they find themselves avoiding doing anything, and then spend some time knocking off a few easy ones to get their oomph back before they tackle the next tough one.

What works for you, works for you. There Is No One True Way. Try stuff until you find the thing that works. (Note that “works for you” unfortunately does not mean “makes it all easy to do.” “Works” only means that you can get it done, not that it’s easy.)

Which made me chuckle. Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if “works for you” meant “easy.”

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