If the Revision Process Is Deep and Ruthless Enough

[dr_pretentious]

Finished this pass of revisions to Part 3 of the big book. Finished the markup phase of this pass for Part 4 of the big book.

I cut Part 3 back, and back, and back...and then admitted to myself that there was no way to avoid adding a chapter of warfare. There was this battle I'd carefully kept off-stage all through the first draft because I didn't trust my ability to write it. So now it's in glorious technicolor. Fortunately, I cut enough other things in Part 3 so that the word count just about breaks even. Remember that 26-page dinner party? Much, much shorter. And I used to have this annoying tic of using dialogue tags to figure out, for my own benefit, what the characters were thinking, because I didn't really know my characters yet. The reader needs a whole lot less of that than I did two years ago. Cut cut cut.

Part 4 will be harder to fix. In the first draft, the ending was in a different spot, so the current end feels middle-ish and needs a new feel to go with a knot of events that remains largely unchanged. Yet again, as in my long-ago first round of repairs to Part 1, whole scenes will be, act for act, the same, while not one single sentence can be preserved. Yet again, whole chapters are in the wrong POV, because I was writing to find out what my options were. There are new minor characters who became indispensable in my repairs to Parts 1-3 who don't exist yet in the first draft of Part 4 (ship's informer, anyone?), and who now need to be threaded forward. To my great dismay, I may have difficulty cutting the infamous 40-page parade down by half. It's doing more work than I remembered.

A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend who'd read the whole first draft, and into the roughed-out chapters that used to belong to vol 1 and now belong to the sequel. "Nothing happens in the second half," he said, "but it's such interesting nothing, I can't put it down." Well, okay, this is a good compliment, and I've heard compliments like that applied to successful published novels, but it bewildered me, because in those chapters that gave the impression of nothing happening, there were riots, regicidal plots, industrial accidents with many dead, profanations of funeral rites, a shocking murder, etc. I said to myself, I am doing something seriously wrong if an astute reader can read those events, remember those events, and come away feeling that he has read a lot of addictive nothing.

Last week I figured out exactly what it was I'd been doing to foster that illusion of nothing. The opening paragraphs of about half of the chapters in the first drafts of Part 3 and Part 4 point to who the viewpoint character will be, and then spend a page or so talking about what everyone else who isn't on stage is doing. Weird, isn't it? Useful for me, I suppose, since I seem to have been using those paragraphs to clarify for myself the context of the actions I was about to launch into, but every one of those chapters starts, then puts the brakes on the action as the first thing it does, before gradually accelerating into an event that actually changes something.

The amazing thing is not that the writer KJ showed the first draft to stalled out at page 87. The amazing thing is that anyone, anywhere, ever made it as far as page 87 of the first draft.

I keep quoting Anne LaMott to myself, saying the first draft must be shitty, not in order to justify writing more first draft stuff, but to avoid becoming paralyzed by my own judgment of this material I haven't touched in so long. What was I thinking when I wrote X? Why did no one have the kindness to drown me in the river and spare me the mortification of having written Y--where were my friends when I needed them? How can I have thought I had any right to continue writing after making mistake Z?

But it's all reparable. Even when I'm most horrified by my own gaffes, I know that fixing them will just be work, and work that I seem now to know how to do. It's the ontological implications of the mistakes, of being capable of making those mistakes, of being the kind of person who could make them--that's what gets under my skin.

The trick is to keep working while mortified. That, at least, I get right.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Why did no one have the kindness to drown me in the river and spare me the mortification of having written Y--where were my friends when I needed them?

Because we were all addicted. Because your ability to create people and places that are alive and breathing and important, and your ability to convey the richness of their lives, are so great that they overcame any of the problems you have come up with. For myself, I just wanted more - next chapter! next chapter! give me more crack!

Consider: If this was the effect of your early draft, you can't blame us. Blame your prodigious talent.

hey now

[cthulhia]

the only reason I haven't been pressing you too much to read the revamps is because it would oblige too much printing. And, because I've been under the impression that you stopped continuing the timeline in order to rewrite the plot points I've already read.

reading about your rewrites does make me slightly less annoyed with, say, the snail's pace of George RR Martin.

anyway, the story was amazing enough from the start that a whole lot of us didn't notice the "shitty"-ness of the firt draft.

also, and more to the point

[cthulhia]

we certainly aren't going to kill you until after we know how the story ends. (o:

(but don't get all sheherazade on our asses now. we probably won't kill you then either. heck, you'll come back from the dead as a ghost demanding one of us help you rewrite it all, again. )

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

but every one of those chapters starts, then puts the brakes on the action as the first thing it does, before gradually accelerating into an event that actually changes something. ... Why did no one have the kindness to drown me in the river and spare me the mortification of having written [such things]

gee, i remember attempting the moral equivalent of it for that particular boo-boo. ;)

[kistha.livejournal.com]

On, Teb, On!

We want our crack, and we want to see how it all ends.

Look at it this way, if the terrible horrible draft was enough to addict people, imagine the addiction of the fixed version...

Fear the mighty pen, oh people, prepare to be addicted!

[oakleaves.livejournal.com]

...the first draft must be shitty, not in order to justify writing more first draft stuff, but to avoid becoming paralyzed by my own judgment of this material...

I think this kind of thought is my biggest problem, and why I have trouble even getting started.

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

"...but every one of those chapters starts, then puts the brakes on the action as the first thing it does, before gradually accelerating into an event that actually changes something."


This problem immediately made me think of the whole "inverted pyramid" concept of article writing in journalism, which I then thought could also be an effective way to construct a chapter. Interesting how the mind translates ideas into things we can chew on, huh?

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, my first attempts are always the sloppiest drivel you can imagine. I have to do the mental equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and yelling "lalalalalalala!" to keep the demons from taunting me about how awful I am. Drawing classes, and remembering my process with acting weirdly enough helped me sort this out psychologically, because I seem to work the same way in every artistic medium. Initially it all looks (and feels) like crap, but in the end it seems to come together.

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

This is a great entry for writer's to read--not just any writer, but especially NaNo writers who pump out 50,000 words or more of dreck in a month and never look at it again, or look at it with such despair as to never pick up a pen keyboard again. It's great that you are able to identify the problem spots and rectify them in your second draft. I did 13 drafts of my first novel and the last (unfinished) one is the first one that actually looked like a publishable work. It takes guts to get past the first draft. Congratulations!

[awritersweekend.livejournal.com]

::beams, as would the proud midwife::

You've reached the tipping point. Keep writing. Then, revise.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I tell myself this, by way of encouragement, but I'm still baffled. When I take the sentences and paragraphs apart now to make them better, I'm not sure I understand anymore what it was about that first draft that made it so engaging. There are some bits that came out really well the first time that don't need too much tinkering--vast swaths of the cheese-smuggling chapter are still funny as I first wrote them, and the chapter that drove you to send me the 2am email shouting that MATHNAL MUST DIE!!!! doesn't need much changing. The chapters around it need a lot of tinkering, but I got Mathnal's voice just right in his last chapter. Damn, he's creepy.

Re: also, and more to the point

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It's a really good thing that I could only intermittently notice the shittyness of the first draft during that first year. I needed my pickiest readers (twoeleven and radiotelescope, hands down), to keep me honest, and I needed my most effusive readers (you, and AMSK, and vgnwtch), to keep keep me plugging away while I was still just starting to build momentum.

Did I ever send you what I used to call the New Middle? There are a lot of plot points in those chapters that I didn't know about when I wrote the first draft. It's short enough, I'd be happy to snailmail you hard copy if you don't have it.

I can barely imagine how hard it must be for GRRM. One of the mind-blowing things about him is that he can write stuff so sprawly, and yet deliver mss to his editor that need hardly any revision. I met his editor at the conference, and she said that all the last one needed from her was some tweaking about the sequence of the chapters.

I'm not aiming for Scheherazade, believe me. Remember that old neurotic notion I used to have that I might get hit by a bus before finishing my dissertation? How I used to flog myself with the terror of random accidents--write faster, Sarah, write faster! You don't want to die a grad student! Well, now I'm starting to fear that the mythical bus will hit me while the series is still unfinished. I know so much about the last volume's denouement, and I'm itching to get there, myself.

Definition of a happy afterlife: one in which I spend eternity writing.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If I ever truly do need to be drowned in the river, I know I can trust you to get the job done. : )

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I can't wait to show you how it all ends, and how it all gets there. Believe me, I'm writing as fast as I can.

Probably the prequel will have to be the gateway drug. I'm looking forward to getting back to that in a couple of weeks. If only I were as addicted to that shorter project as I need the gatekeepers of the industry to be...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Tai Chi has been immensely helpful. For about a year and a half, my teacher has been saying, "Sarah, your back knee is locked." Not being a kinesthetic learner, I actually couldn't feel that my back knee was locked. It would feel nice and loose to me, then looser, then looser, and still, Sifu would tell me it was locked. Then suddenly one day, when it was looser than I'd ever managed to get it, I could feel the lock. "Oh!" I said. "Now I get it! My back knee is locked." But I couldn't figure out how to unlock it. "Don't try," said Sifu. "Now that you can feel it's wrong, you need to do it wrong for six months, so you'll always be able to tell how it feels when it's locked." The idea of deliberately maintaining an error is really alien, but it seems to be working.

Maybe this is what William Blake meant when he said, "If the fool will persist in his folly, he will become wise." Actually, I'm not at all sure what Blake meant, but that's been one of my mantras since I started work on the big book.

Re: also, and more to the point

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

while it may not have helped your momentum, i figured that if all your readers spent their time chanting "lovely, lovely, lovely is the lady of writing! the whole earth is full of her beauty!" you would neither get done nor better.

the problem with being an addict is that one needs more stuff and of higher purity to get the same rush as at the beginning. and since you seem to be our sole supplier, you're just gonna have to get better. sorry. :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the old Don't Bury The Lead injunction, but sometimes a chapter needs two leads--the one you open with, and then the one you bury that the reader isn't supposed to recognize is important until a hundred pages later.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I learned how to revise, really deeply revise, by working on poetry. My wonderful undergraduate mentor Nancy Willard photocopied Elizabeth Bishop's drafts, since Bishop's papers were in our college archive. We looked at 13 drafts of "One Art" in that poetry seminar, and watched one of the most respected poems of its century take shape from an absolutely unpromising initial note Bishop wrote to herself about lost keys. Fearless, merciless revision, completely willing to make wrong turns, to backtrack, to shift forms altogether, and then to dive straight into the central loss of Bishop's adult life. It's the kind of lesson a writer never forgets.

I learned how to revise prose, though, from watching my students. I knew all the right platitudes to say to my first batch of freshman comp bunnies, but I'd always had enough of a knack to get away with handing in my first drafts, myself. It was only when I saw what the bunnies could accomplish when they took me at my word that I started to turn the platitudes into practices. And voila, they all work! Bless those bunnies.

(Of course, that first batch of bunnies turned 30 this year, but thinking too hard about that makes me feel old.)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

When this book finally sells...oh, hold on, you don't drink champagne...I'm going to send you the most fabulous box of chocolates.

Re: also, and more to the point

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Y'know that moment in The Fellowship of the Ring when Galadriel imagines accepting the Ring from Frodo--ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR! When I notice I'm getting a tad full of myself, I try saying that sentence out loud without cracking up, just to see if I still pass the test. My reasoning is, as long as it's still funny to me, I'm probably not lost yet. But yeah, the All Shall Love Me And Despair deal is not without its counterproductive appeal.

I'd better get continually better. I've been reading a lot of Locus reviews lately, and there is no mercy out there for a writer who rests on her laurels.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

I couldn't tell you exactly what it was that caught my imagination, beyond the fact that that place and those people are REAL, damnit! I know it in my bones that you're describing what actually happened. And I care. I care far, far too much for it to be healthy.

And Mathnal is beyond creepy. He's so fucked up it's scary. And he must still die. In a really satisfying way. I trust you on this.