Revision: How To Love It

Maybe I should title this post “Why I Love It” instead. No matter what, some people will always despise this part of the process.

It can be daunting. You have the whole manuscript sitting in front of you. Writing the first draft was painful enough; why should we have to both revisit that pain and inflict new? I mean, you’re ripping out parts of your baby!

And what happens if you rip out the wrong parts?

Revising can be tedious. I have spent weeks on a single chapter (mostly because I kept putting it off and getting distracted, to be completely honest). When a brand new story is calling your name, how can you justify that time on an old one?

Confession #1: I am ruthless with my own work. The more red pen I see on the page, the happier I am. If it’s not there, I feel like I’m doing something wrong.

Confession #2: I often do find editing daunting and tedious and overwhelming. But then I remember how much I revel in the feeling of making my story better in a tangible way.

I also have a method. Most writers I know have their own approach that is nothing like mine. Some need to have a different approach for every story, every draft. But I figured out what works for me by finding out all I could about how other writers revise and edit, then just doing it for myself.

My method first requires that I print out the story. The whole story. (And when the story has a word count that exceeds 100,000, that’s a lot of pages to print.) I tend to procrastinate a fair amount, just on this first step.

Then I read it through as quickly as possible – preferably in one or two sittings. I sometimes make notes as I go along, but I don’t want it to slow me down. The speed can help trick my brain into full reader-mode, as opposed to writer-mode. This is when I see the big things, like the major plot points that are too deus ex machina, or giant plot holes. This is the step at which I am better able to see if I should add, delete, combine, or move scenes.

Example: in my current project, my read-throughs showed me that I needed to add certain characters, entirely remove certain others, and even combine two into a single person. Revising for my fifth draft, I even discovered that I had to add an entirely new race.

But after my read-through, I have to buckle down and put red pen to paper. At this point, I take it one sentence – sometimes just one word – at a time. And bit by bit, it gets me to the end. And the end is an amazing feeling.