A New Revision Strategy

Last week in my guest blog on The Dogpatch, I explained how my writing process has changed this year from an annoying hybrid of discovery writing & outlining to a flawless summary method. If you haven’t read it yet, you might want to check it out here. Not only because I think it’s an excellent post, but because this week, I’m revealing the results of my new method.

I have now read through draft 1 of Dream of a City of Ruin, and I’m happy to report that it is not a 150K word mess.

It’s a 130K word story, more or less.

Is it perfect? Not by a long shot. I have four pages of notes of “big picture” stuff to revise. And there is probably a pencil mark of some sort on every single page. But I’ve read a lot of my own drafts (DVBC alone went through at least ten), enough to know that what I have here is coherent, has a clear and fairly complete arc and while it needs revision, it doesn’t need to be re-written completely, or split into three different books, or “accidentally” not backed-up before I try to flush my laptop down the toilet.

So far, so good. The question looming now is, what do I do with it? It is a new and somewhat scary thing for me to be sitting on a draft this clean and complete, without having tortured the thing so many times that I can’t look at it again without projectile vomiting.

Here are a few of my past revision tactics:

1. The waiting game: I actually highly recommend this one. Sometimes it pays to put some distance between yourself and the draft. Set it aside and wait until you can’t remember anything about it, until you pick it up and your name in the header is the only evidence that you actually wrote it. Then when you go to revise, you’ll no longer care and you’ll be able to kill your darlings with impunity. Honestly, this is not a form of procrastination. I guess it’s no mystery why it’s taken me fifteen years to write a good book, though.

2. Targeted revision passes: I don’t recommend this one. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t read a draft and focus on just one thing at a time (the idea is to read for plot errors, then read again for character revision, then read for setting issues, etc). I’ve tried, because it makes sense; if I could read and focus just on character, I could probably strengthen that aspect considerably. But it all gets soupy. If I see a problem, I want to fix it. I don’t care what kind of a problem it is.

3. Revising on Screen vs. printing the draft: I’ve done this a fair bit in the past, and sometimes it works. Sometimes I can read through a draft and fix a lot of issues without shelling out the cash to print stuff I’m going to cut anyway. This time, I decided not to. Maybe I just had that much confidence in the draft. Maybe I just wanted to feel it in my hands. Maybe I was just tired of staring at my computer.

4. Multiple revision passes: Normally after I mark up a printed draft, I  take my notes and my marked up draft and go straight away to the computer and enter all the changes and then print out draft 2 and sit down again with my pencil and scratch my head over the changes that aren’t working and then enter another round of changes and then do it all over again. I have probably printed a small old-growth forest worth of drafts doing this.

Since it seemed like most of my revision tactics were as ineffective as my previous drafting tactics, I decided I wanted to form a new revision strategy to go with my shiny new summarizing method.

The other day when I was reading through the draft it came to me. Maybe I should read this draft again, before I enter any changes.

And then I thought, duh, why haven’t I been doing this all along? When I read a fellow writer’s draft to critique it, whether it’s long or short, I never, ever read it through just once. I always do an initial read-through to get a sense of the piece, see the shape of the story, and make some notes on first impressions. Then I sit down and really tear into it. I can’t imagine writing a thorough critique of a piece of writing without at least two read-throughs. And yet, all this time, I’ve never once read through a printed draft of my own more than once. I’ve been giving myself the short end of the stick.

So this morning, having read the whole thing, I sat down and in the half-hour between breakfast and work, re-read three of my favorite scenes from Book II. And gol dang if I didn’t find some more stuff to change. And even more exciting, I figured out how to fix the things that were bothering me about those scenes. I realized that, much like when I critique, the first read-through gave me a sense of what wasn’t working, while the second read-through gave me the clarity to find solutions.

So that’s my new plan of attack, to go with my new drafting method. Basically, I’m going to re-read Draft 1 as many times as it takes until I have a clear plan for revision, or until I’m projectile vomiting, whichever comes first.