Cara McKenna told me on Twitter that she loves a good fessin’-up post in which a writer reveals everything she does wrong in her first drafts and has to fix up at the revision stage. I suppose gloating over other people’s mistakes does have its charms. Or, no, I guess she said something about it making her feel human. Yes, there’s that, too.
So I thought, given how very meta my last post on revision turned out to be, I’d better write a little bit about what my actual nitty-gritty revision process looks like.
I suspect that if I were to dwell in my natural writerly habitat, unconstrained by thoughts of such constructions as “marketability,” “what-Agent-Emily-will-think,” and “getting paid for this motherf*@$ing book,” I would be a tediously slow writer. Because I do so like to fix things up, and when you like to fix things up, there’s little as tempting as the prospect of making that sentence you just wrote the teensiest bit better. And then re-reading the paragraph, merely to see how well you’ve done. And finding a fixable flaw, and fixing it, and then rereading the scene from the start. Reworking it a bit here or there. Rereading the chapter. And so on.
For me — and this is particularly true on the slower, less-inspired writing days, when I’m not quite sure where this story is headed or if this scene sucks — the prospect of coming up with a new sentence will always be less enticing than the joys of tinkering with one that’s already there.
But because I do quite enjoy finishing books, and I do care what Agent Emily thinks, and I do so hope to be paid for this motherf*$)#ing book, I push myself to spit out the writing in large-ish, undigested chunks. I wake up early to write, between three and three-thirty a.m. most days, and I have until my son starts hollering “Mama come!” approximately two hours later to get something written. I usually manage at least a thousand words, sometimes two thousand or more. On days when I’m virtuous, I don’t edit those words until I’ve made it to the end of a whole scene or chapter, but more often I write five or six hundred words, get stuck, reread and revise lightly, and then carry on. So there’s this SPIT-stutter-tinker-SPIT quality to the process that seems to work for me.
As I spit, I tend to skip over characters’ thought processes and reactions, so when revising I’m often fleshing out. In a particularly egregious case, in the course of a wholesale revision of my second full manuscript, THE MORNING AFTER, I expanded the earliest sex scene in the book from 700 to 2,800 words. The characters didn’t do one additional thing to each other in those extra 2,100 words, but they sure did think about what they were doing more. The new version of the scene is ever-so-much more satisfying to read — and ever-so-much sexier.
I work on day-job stuff in the morning, and then when my son goes down for his nap I get another couple hours to write. I’m often more easily distracted by this time of day, and I find it helps to throw myself into a #1k1hr challenge on Twitter or just to invent my own challenge– Something along the lines of, Write the rest of this freaking scene before you open Safari again, or hang your head in shame all afternoon.
Once I’ve got my daily words written, I’ll revise whatever I’ve managed to produce and send it off to Serenity Woods so she can tell me how brilliant I am and, in her wonderful cheerleader-y way, say, “Great job! Keep going! Rah!” (She’s negotiated 15 percent in all my future contracts for this service.)
Sometimes, though, Serenity comes back with an “Umm…,” and her “Umm…” must always be heeded, because she is always right. This happens most often when I try to skip something. “Hmm,” I think. “I’m not really sure what exactly happens next, but I don’t think it matters. Must carry on with this pesky plot. Onward and upward!” And Serenity says, “Here’s the thing. I really wanted to know what happened next. And I wanted to see it.” Which means, shit, I have to figure it out and write about it.
I am a skipper. It’s excellent, if you’re a skipper, to have a critique partner who will notice when you skip stuff and call you to the carpet for it.
Serenity’s also good at telling me when I’m giving scenes to the wrong people. In critiquing my first/fourth book, REBOUND (thus identified because it was the first novel I ever wrote, but then later I rewrote 97 percent of it from scratch), Serenity told me it appeared I was in love with one of my secondary characters, because I kept giving him the hero’s scenes. Whoops. Delete. Rewrite.
I go on like this from day to day until the book is done, and then I’ll read my manuscript through from the beginning and fix all its horrible secret flaws, such as its overuse of the words “horrible,” “secret,” and “flaws.” (Fo’ real.)
I’ll take out at least two out of three appearances of the words “apparently,” “like,” “just,” “little,” and “all.”
I’ll cut way back on the reading-of-eyes and the manly groaning, the clutching of hips and the smirking of smirks.
I’ll remember that people have to smell like something, so I’ll make sure they do. (I wrote a whole blog post on that.)
I’ll try to stop my characters from looking, gazing, and glancing at things so damn much.
I’ll give them a swear jar, not because I’m anti-swearing but because when they swear all the time, they get boring, and sometimes the hero needs to have a more creative, telling reaction than “Christ.”
I’ll find some way to describe various intimacy-related things with words other than “wet,” “hot,” and “tight.” These are excellent words, but, yeah. There are other ones, even without venturing into the realm of throbbing purple prose.
I’ll force the hero and heroine to stop calling one another by name all the time, because nobody does that.
Then, once I’ve made myself jettison as many of my identifiable word-crutches as I can bear, I’ll revise for rhythm, trying to ensure I don’t have too many sentences with the same language or the same structure, too many words with too many syllables or too many short, curt statements in a row.
I’ll try never to start two paragraphs running with the words “he” or “she.”
I’ll attempt to find a way to make the end of each chapter lure you into the next, but I’m coming to terms with my complete uselessness at this. I like to wrap things up neatly. This is not at all what I’m supposed to do. Someone will have to teach me how to stop.
Then I’ll put the book on my Kindle and read it again. (I write in Scrivener, and Scrivener has a function that allows me to export Kindle or ePub files. It’s also possible to e-mail a Word doc to your own Kindle. Or to someone else’s. Remind me sometime to tell you the story of how I smut-spammed a stranger over the Fourth of July weekend.) This time, I try to read quickly, as a normal reader does, and catch anything that stands out as really off in the prose, the plot, or the pacing.
Once I’ve fixed all that up, I mail the manuscript off to my two beta readers, Serenity and Gina, and they tell me where I’ve gone wrong. Serenity catches all the passive voice and various other bits of awkwardness she was too kind to mention the first time she read through the chapters. Gina does this too, and she also does me the favor of letting me know when characters don’t behave as she expects/wants them to. They both lavish me with praise, for which I never cease to be grateful.
Then, one more polish to fix up whatever Serenity and Gina have discovered, and I ship it off to Agent Emily.
How about you? Is your process anything like mine? Do you make the same mistakes or different ones? Fess up.
