Excuse me while I take this opportunity to whine.
Early Revision is overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start. I’m someone who reads through a draft and sees all the little things – the line level edits that I want to make. It’s excruciatingly difficult to ignore them and focus on the big picture. It’s even harder to make a plan for that big stuff and follow through because it always involves changing things in a way that I lose some of the stuff I happen to like. Maybe a great sentence or a fun scene or something that I can see right away doesn’t serve the story, but man—is hard to delete.
Those middle stages of revision are energy-sucking. Draining. Knowing that you need to fix something, trying on ___ for size and it doesn’t work. Trying something else. I start to lose sight of what I’m trying to accomplish and get confused by what I’m doing and lose the will to go on.
Final revision isn’t a peach. I’m not seeing what’s on the page at this point; I can only see what’s been there before. I have no fresh eyes. I have to call in Trusted Readers at this point and say, “Help. Fix this for me,” while I’m sobbing on the floor in the fetal position. Also this is the stage where I’m wondering what on earth made me ever want to write a book about this story to begin with. It’s boring and irrelevant. No one besides me would ever want to read it and I don’t even want to read it at this point so why go on??
Revision just sucks. It’s a beast that has to be slayed. And because every time I go up against it, I seem to forget everything I know about it, I’m going to type up a list largely for myself and put it right here in the files of the Internet.
Stuff I Want To Remember About Revision:
- It’s hard. No matter how easy you think it’s going to be in your head, it always ends up being way more complicated than that and taking five times as many weeks as you thought.
- So stop making deadlines. Just tackle one thing at a time until it’s done. Forget about a calendar.
- Start with the big stuff. What does your character want? Seriously, you have a hard time with that. You’re always saving that for last and then wanting to scrape out your eyeballs with a spoon because of it. So just figure that out first before you touch a single other thing.
- It doesn’t all suck. When you feel like it does, send it out to some people you trust and have them tell you something good about it.
- Believe them.
- Get off the internet. Close it out. Stop staring outside the window and thinking about those trees that need to be trimmed because we know you’re not going to do that and anyway you already have something to do in front of you.
- Finish it. Really. Just dig in and do it and stop whining about it and especially stop whining about it in a word doc that you’re going to turn into a blog post because that makes you feel like you’re working hard on something even though what you’re really doing is avoiding the something you’re supposed to be working on.
I’m going to end here I think.