Necessary evils: Revising

Anais Nin once said “we write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Beautiful sentiment, right?

But what about when you’re tasting it for the eighth time that week, and this time, it’s under deadline? Talk about indigestion.

And that’s exactly how I see revision quite often. ..a third, fourth, or fifth helping of something that’s starting to make me a little queasy, and can’t I just have something new for once?

Here’s a better quote about revision from Pete Murphy:

“Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.”

Yes!

Like the rituals I mentioned in a previous post, as writers we all have our own revision methods when it comes to getting our manuscripts bright, shiny and out the door. Some of us are linear. Some of us are “whole picture” types.  And most of us? Well, we’re works in progress.

I’ve been reading  “Manuscript Makeover” by Elizabeth Lyon and she sees the process as two-fold. We’re either looking from the inside-out (watching for our nuances and our “voice”—the style that makes our works our own and what those agents/editors/and publishers seek) or we can work from the outside-in (where we get down to the structure of our paragraphs, our word usage, our structure).

Both views are essential, Lyons says, and both lead to better manuscripts. Check the book out if you get a chance. As a person going through SERIOUS edits on two manuscripts in the wave of two requests, I needed serious perspective.

Here at Passionate Critters, our revision style is probably as unique as we are. But we tend to fall into two camps. The “edit-as-you-go” writers, and the “get-it-all-out-first-and-revisit-later” types.

Debora is the classic write/edit at the same time author and says that she can’t really call her first draft her first draft. “Because my first draft goes through so many changes, it’s probably more my sixth draft by the time I get to it at the end.” She’s also a very linear writer—Debora writes her novels from start to finish and cannot do scenes out of order.

On the other hand, there’s Nina. She plows through her first draft very quickly (“But I do quite a lot of plotting first,” she says) and doesn’t edit along the way. Once complete, she reads the entire way through, making notes. Then it’s chapter by chapter. When it comes to cutting, she finds it easier to let go than to add. “I like to have a good few thousand words in hand so I don’t feel bad about dumping stuff.”

Rewrite dynamo Bethanne has spent an entire year and a half on one manuscript. (Dedication, much?!) She’ll read through once looking for the glaring grammar problems and line edits. Once that’s done, she does the chapter by chapter method. “Revisions are completed as I come to them, even if it means going back during the chapter sequence and layering in. I’ll forget otherwise.” She is also a big believer in skeleton plotting beforehand.

Stephanie hates the rewriting. “I feel like the effort has already been made, so I don’t want to rehash it again.” She lets her manuscripts breathe quite a bit, and says she sees so much more than she does the during the initial edits.

Vanessa has no problem cutting, either. “Unless it’s a character I’m attached to,” she says. “My darkest villain says some very lovely things, but they are often unnecessary.”

Vanessa likes the entire process, especially seeing what her draft has been before and what it looks like after. Just in case, though, Vanessa is known to save a million drafts.

“Just in case I do something stupid,” she says. And rewriting? "Rewriting bites.” (Amen!)

Jenn is another linear writer—from start to finish—who “semi-edits” as she writes. A self-prescribed “bare bones writer,” she uses her subsequent passes through her manuscript to add layers, grammar, and punctuation. When she has critiques, she works them in, but finds cutting hard to do while writing. "Ihate to see the word count go down!” she explains.

Rachel, the uber-producer, is decidedly non-linear.

“I will write the first few chapters, some middle scenes, and the end, not necessarily in that order, and fill in the blanks.” She sees her manuscript as a movie and different parts come out at different times. And edits? She fits them in as life allows.  Crits, she says, make editing much easier for her.

“What’s difficult for me in the process,” she says. ‘Is that when I rewrite something, I wonder what is wrong when I’m done. “

In the end, Rachel’s got the attitude right: “I try to be thorough, and yet remember the reason I write. Only so much can be given to the editing process.” 

Joyce line edits as she goes, then goes back chapter-by-chapter. Not content with a single pass-through, she lets it breathe a bit, and then starts the process over. Her biggest frustration is thinking she’s got something figured out—then encountering a character that won’t behave.

“I think I have a character figured out, and he’ll tell me something new when I’m done editing and writing, and I have to go back and change things.”

Another  challenge for Joyce? Knowing when to quit. 

“Sometimes I edit so much that I lose my voice and that makes me mad!”

And that leaves Harper… 

A grammar-fiend, I cannot go a paragraph without fixing commas, periods, or spacing. Typos mock me and I have to go back and get them. But it ends there. I don’t rewrite crappy dialogue or watered-down characters until I’m done with a section. When it comes time to get down and dirty in the manuscript, I look for a few key things the first pass through. (And I cannot edit on screen. Paper copies are a must for my own edits and for the crits I do.) 

I seek out all of my adverbs. Any time I see “quickly” or “slowly,” or others on my list, I highlight it. Same thing for “was.” When it’s time, those sentences get rewritten. Adverbs are good warning signs for writers—they’re usually overused and signify a weak verb (that needed your adverb in the first place!)

They also can be red flags for the ways we build sentences (subject ,verb, adverb , noun) and I try to vary that as best as I can. (I’m notorious for building “dependant clause, independent clause” sentences. Example: “A cat without fear of cholesterol, Garfield was notorious for his love of lasagna.” They’re everywhere in my writing!)

I keep a post-it pad with me and jot down words I think I’m overusing. (“Gaze” is one of them. Gag!) Then I’ll get in the document later and do a search for them. (I’ve come up with 12 instances of the word “quickly” in the first three chapters of a work once. Nice, eh??) 

The bottom line in revising is this: it’s miserable, but it’s necessary. So we suck it up. We perfect our methods…and we get going with our writing.

Kind of like the dreaded task of putting the laundry away after its clean, life (and writing) can’t really go on until we do!

 

 

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