Revisionist Theory

I really should be revising my novel right now.

No, really. I should be. I spent the entire month of November crafting this novel from scratch, with a few ideas, a little ingenuity, and a lot of intrigue and metaphors. I just love those metaphors. It was a part of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which I took a part in for the first time ever. And it was fun, much more fun than just writing by myself, because it is a collective of writers all urging each other on, and inspiring each other to finish the 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. Of course, what they don’t tell you at NaNoWriMo is that what you have created by the end of November is just a rough draft. All the blood, sweat, and commas led up to merely a finished rough draft, and that’s where the trouble starts.

As an English teacher, I tell my students that the first part of the writing process is just getting the thoughts down on paper. This drafting is the fun part because nothing is wrong. Just write everything down. However, what no one likes is the second part, the revisions, because we are all too attached to our work, and/or too lazy to want to make any changes. The problem is that without those changes what we have is too loose and unorganized to have any lasting value. Revision is what I call a necessary evil, and just like my students I absolutely detest it, but it is a means to an end.

To get me through any revision process are the rewards I allow myself when I reach certain checkpoints, depending on how large the piece of writing was to begin with. Rewards can include but are not limited to: pizza, a Wii game, a new book (for $1.00 from the library book sale — I’m not made of money), a 3 Musketeers bar, or the chance to write a blog (you can thank me later). So I slog through the revisions, and I despise every step of the journey because I really am too close to my own work. I love what I’ve written, and I feel like I’m committing murder when I cut anything out, or when I realize upon a second reading that I have inconsistencies.

When I revise, I check for five things. First, there is grammar, and this one is usually immense. While I know what I meant to say in my head when I was writing the rough draft, often I type so quickly and my mind is moving so quickly to the next thing that I tend to not say what I meant to say. Grammar includes also missed commas, botched capitalization (yes, even I do it sometimes), and run-on sentences. Word choice is next, and it’s a huge one as well because it involves cutting and adding, rearranging sentences, paragraph structure, and the like. Then there’s plot inconsistencies. I find that during the course of a novel, sometimes characters find and lose their voice, often one thing happens before something else when it should have been the other way around, or a character just isn’t believable. This part of revision takes longer than the previous two because it involves more than just changing one or two words. It usually means adding whole sections, or deleting entire sections. It’s the most tedious process and takes even more close reading. The fourth thing I check for is minor characters. Have I made them believable? Do they need a back story? And last but not least, I come up with a title. You probably think a title would be the first thing on my list, but I let the story when it is finished tell me what title it needs. That doesn’t happen until after the revisions, so that makes them necessary, even though I think they’re still evil.

So, yeah, let me get back to the process already, okay?

Sam