Welcome to another guest-hosted installment of Write On! Like my previous one, itâs based on what Iâve learned from my efforts.
DaKoWriMo is in full swing. (Thatâs the Daily Kos Writing Month.) Letâs check in on progress before getting to the meat of the discussion:
bonetti: 30 revision tasks; 8 done
dconrad: 20,000 words.
Leo Orionis: Write âA New Viewpointâ. 20-25% done.
Mercy Ormont: Continue/finish Thirty-Nine Years on the Street memoir.
mettlefatigue: Find my WO stories that could go in OFPM. (4 stories found)
Mnemosyne: Finish NNWM 10k-word goal; 3800 written.
reppa: Continuing research on potential projects.
RiverOfTheWest: Complete revisions and illustrations of the history book; 700 words & 5 illustrations.
strawbale: Write another alien story + the foreword to the collection.
TASW: 50 pages of Callie and the Solicitresses.
Tonight, I want to talk revision.
There are a lot of resources for first drafts, from books and courses to events like NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and DaKoWriMo. Much of the advice revolves around BIC HOK TAM, or variations thereupon. What there doesnât seem to be is a lot of âwhat nowâ once you have a first draft. (I took a previous stab at it here, talking about revision passes.)
For 2019, except for the NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo months, my focus was revising a manuscript.
Here are some of the things Iâve learned in the past year.
Letâs start with the big one: I suck at it. I mean, I got pretty good at word spewage thanks to NaNoWriMo, but what to do with them after that is confusing. Itâs a different skill set, and itâs taking me time to learn â a lot more time than I thought it would. Worse, I tackled one of my earliest Camp NaNoWriMo projects, and it was started as a giant mess. It was one of the last no-outline projects I did. (As a metric, using SensibleShoeâs stages of editing, it was mostly content editing, and itâs been shifting to line editing.)
Iâm not capable of simply throwing out what I have and writing a whole new draft while fixing all the big problems along the way. I can to targeted restructuring, or a fresh draft, but itâs still effectively a first draft. (Piers Anthony used to describe his process as three drafts, each from scratch, fixing the issues in the previous one. Iâve tried it because I can hit word counts, but it doesnât work for me. I get paralyzed at doing too much at once. Maybe some day Iâll figure it out.) Worse, because the expectations are higher for the redraft, I usually stall when I try it.
Targeted revision passes do work for me. So I might, say, unify a specific characterâs voice, or focus on describing certain things, or go through and fix up a reference to something, or rebuild a timeline, then take several passes to smooth out the rough edges, or clean up a throughline. Or I might do a pass smoothing prose, tweaking dialog tags, or fixing nagging style, grammar, punctuation errors, or change a name. Having a single goal makes it much easier to stay on task instead of chasing every single problem I see. (I do make note of other problems in passing.)
I have a really hard time throwing stuff away even when it isnât working. If I have a key scene, I canât just scrap it and start over. But I can write a new version of it. Or several versions. Once I have several versions, I can construct a whole new one from the pieces I like. Depending on just how key the scene is to me, it might be the only way to get it right. Sift out all the pieces, try several takes on it, then figure out what the scene actually needs to do and build it that way. (In my WIP, there was a scene that was absolutely key to introducing a character and a relationship, and I kept finding moments I liked but couldnât get the scene right until I picked things I liked, spread âem around in an order that mostly worked, and filled in the holes with new material.)
Characters with distinct world views can color their POVs and their dialog with specific vocabulary and metaphors. One of the Writing Excuses crew pointed this out, saying he build actual vocabulary lists for characters (words they use for specific expressions, words they never use). Choice in profanity and euphamisms, in particular, is useful here. Character background (warrior vs. sailor vs. diplomat vs. blacksmith) can show through. Careful word choice can show character progress in their arc, such as a character who thought one way (individual tactics as a warrior) starting to thing differently (logistics and thinking of the shipâs crew as a whole). This also makes for a revision pass, emphasizing a particular character.
Each writerâs process is their own. What other people do can influence your own process, and itâs certainly worth seeing what other writers do. However, just because someone else does something doesnât mean itâll work for you (or me). And just because it worked for one book you wrote doesnât mean it will work for a different one. The writing process is a perpetual work in progress, at least for me.
My revision process is highly iterative. A writer gets as many attempts as time allows. (This freedom can be paralyzing, too, which is why external deadlines work so well for some. Like me.)
Placeholders have their place. If a scene needs to do something, and no clever approach comes to mind, a quick description of intent (like a telegraph line) or a ridiculously cliched exchange can nail the moment down, allowing it to get cleaned up later. There were key places where a placeholder let me test a restructure without investing a lot of writing time. Then, once the intent was nailed, I could brainstorm on how to write something that fits.
That last lesson may be the most important one, for me. I frequently stumbled while restructuring, and I could write an entire Write On! about just this one lesson. I canât always see a work from an outline (I havenât found an outlining method that works for me), but I can see it once I have a scene, however sketchy and bad, in the right place. Then the story becomes visible. I can focus on the whole, not the hole.
Placeholders also lend themselves quite conveniently to a revision exercise!
Tonightâs exercise / homework:
The following is highly cliched. It accomplishes a specific purpose: intense confrontation, resolution, moving on to the next thing.
âAre we done here?â A asked.
âAbsolutely not!â B slammed a hand down. âYou are going to do this, whether you like it or not.â
A sulked. B glared.
A sighed and gave in.
B nodded. âNow weâre done here.â
Using characters in your Work In Progress (or, if you prefer, Callow Youth and Stout Companion), modify this placeholder to fit in while maintaining the arc of the conversation. (Insert names, actions, and descriptions, too, as well as changing the actual dialog. Ideally keep almost nothing except the feel of the scene.)
Happy Writing!