You've Got Revision All Wrong

When I was in high school and college, teachers would talk to us about revising papers and focus us on fixing sentences, rearranging paragraphs, and choosing better words. Which is definitely revising on one level. The problem was that when I became a professional writer, I realized that this was the very last stage of revision, basically the copy-editing level. This was the easiest kind of revision. And no one had ever taught me about the real revision that went on before that stage. I don't know if that was because no one in high school knew how to do that kind of revision, or if it was so frightening that they didn't dare talk about it. I'm going to dare to talk about it.

The revisions that I do before I get to copy-editing are massive. MASSIVE. Like, every single word of the manuscript changes. Sometimes all the scenes are in the right order (Ha--this is never true, but we'll pretend it is for a little while). It's just that I have the voice wrong. Or the point of view. Or I change the rules of magic. Or I have to tweak a character's motivations. Or the setting is now historical--or isn't historical anymore. Or I'm now writing a series instead of a standalone. Or a thousand different changes that probably sound like they're small in terms of scope, but in fact change every single word of the book. Because my descriptions are going to change based on how my character changes. And how I introduce the magic or offer setting details changes if the point of view is different.

And then there are even bigger changes. Like when your main character gets written out of the entire manuscript because it turns out the best part of your first draft wasn't her. Or when the whole reason that you wrote the novel in the first place turns out to be untenable, but there are parts that you're still interested in and you've decided to try to salvage them by writing a completely different first draft. Or your magic system doesn't work at all and you can only fix it by telling the novel that you were thinking maybe would one day be the prequel, about a shadowy character who no one knows about in the future but turned out to be vital to the formation of the magic system in the first place.

I know that some writers manage to figure out these kinds of problems before they start writing a first draft, but I'll tell you honestly, not many do. Even writers who outline extensively find a ton of problems that require massive, massive revisions. And the writers who aren't finding their problems by writing drafts are spending just as much time (IMHO) figuring out the problems in their heads.

Almost always, when I see a writer who isn't making progress from draft to draft it's because they aren't either willing or able to make these kinds of revisions. They hold tight to their original vision of a project because they think that's what people mean when they say to "write the book of your heart." Or they honestly don't know how to reimagine everything from the bottom up and let everything go in order to rebuild something that's even better. And do it again and again and again in order to get a manuscript that's ready for publication.

I really wish that culturally, we grappled more with what being a creative type is like because I feel like we show in movies and on television that being a writer is about getting this "inspiration" and then sitting in a room and just hammering things out and then playing with words. In my experience, writing is about playing with ideas, scenes, characters. It's about reconsidering everything. In a way, it's a science in which you are experimenting and your drafts are the way to figuring out all that's wrong with your hypothesis, and sometimes are about reformulating the hypothesis and redesigning the experiment a thousand times. (And well, being ready to give up on it a lot, too, because you feel like you've reached the end of progress and you're just going in circles or making things worse--that's part of the process, too.)

When I read a book that is brilliant, I feel like I get a bit of a glimpse of all the other drafts that went into it because it is so layered and it hints at all the other possibilities and shows why they weren't the right one, if that makes any sense. Books that tend not to hold my interest are books that end up feeling like one draft that was polished but doesn't have the depth of a book that went through a lot of revision. These books aren't failures, but they just don't see the tiny mistakes within them and don't address them as they go along.

Sure, there are brilliant books that are written in a hot fever of a few weeks. It happens, but often it happens because the writer has been doing those other drafts elsewhere. And yes, there are books that are piercingly simple and that show no hint of other drafts but still work in their single, great layer of purpose. Writers work in many different ways and my way is not "the one true way," but if you're getting people interested in the idea of your book but not the manuscript itself or if you aren't getting offers on the book even though a lot of editors are reading it, you might consider that it needs a really big revision, a complete new draft that enables you to re-conceptualize everything in a new and better whole.