revising, re-writing, and tiny little caterpillars

[thanate]

I have itty bitty caterpillars in three flavors, some of which have even deigned to eat maple leaves, which seems promising in terms of managing to keep them when I go off to Readercon. I also seem to be holding out at two naps a day ridiculously tired (which there may be a reasonable reason for, but it is still irritating) and spent much of the weekend actually finishing library books, which I've been really rather awful about recently, by which I mean the past six months or so.

But what I really want to know about is how other people handle the revision process. I mean, I know there are those of you out there who re-write whole chapters or books at a time, sometimes semi-compulsively, or make huge changes to character arcs or plotlines. What I mostly don't get is *how*? Maybe this is one of those rhetorical world-view questions to which the main answer is that that's just how some people's brains work, but if anyone is willing or interested in talking about either reasons or mechanics of re-drafting, I'd appreciate a variety of viewpoints. (I mean, up to and including whether you work with a previous draft in front of you, or work entirely from memory.)

I am a great tweaker of words & things, both while I'm writing and afterwards, but the only time I've re-written anything from scratch was the novel and a half that got thrown out with my old harddrive, where all I had was a few notes from the initial writing process to work from. And both endings came out pretty significantly different. I think. Not that I can go back and compare.

The thing I'm struggling with right now is actually not so much re-writing as a plot arc that didn't gel the first time, and doesn't want to do it now, either. I have enough "stuff" to cover to fill up most of the quarter book it's supposed to fill, but jig-sawing it all together and getting rid of the stupid bits without losing the useful parts of the stupid bits... anyway. I suspect the answer is just to set my timer and Do Something but I'm still trying to poke at my brain and find out what's likely to come out of it.

Anyway, thoughts on rewriting/revision, or even on why you don't revise much either, appreciated. (and you don't need to think if yourself as a "real" author to play.)

Comments

[ellis bergstresser (from livejournal.com)]

I'll procrastinate with you. But not because I have anything helpful to say.

I've picked back up with revising now that I have a week where my kids are away from me. Blessed silence and whole hours to string thoughts together. It's strange to come back to this story that I'd left for so long.

I think one of the real struggles with this revision pass is that -- because it is my first novel -- the first-draft process that I went through isn't how I would now choose to write a first draft. It wasn't even really a process: I started with an idea, and I just wrote. I spent a lot of time fine-tuning stuff in the early chapters (so I could submit it for crit, or for Viable Paradise) before I understood where the entire story would end up. I had good reasons for doing it that way -- it got me to VP -- but it was not a good process, in the end.

It wasn't until I got deeply into the novel that I realized the reasons for some of the things that happened in the first couple of chapters. I carried on with pumping out words and just noted for myself that this thing in chapter 10 is because of something that existed but I didn't realize in chapter 2. It felt amazing and magical at the time -- words, words, words pouring onto the page -- and these massive realizations of how it fit together as a whole. It was beautiful.

But now? Making sure that it all ties together is driving me batty.

As for my process, it's very dependent on Scrivener's comments I made while reading earlier drafts. Then I go back and make the changes that I suggested in the comments. Then I power through and see what else needs to change because of those changes. It feels a lot like setting up dominoes to tip them all over.

BUT I WILL FINISH!
Then I'll do it differently next time, having become this much wiser.

I look forward to seeing what everyone else says.

Back to revision - kids come home on Friday. Enjoy the naps: sleep is precious. ;-)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

finish! finish! :) (then do we get to read the rest?)

I almost always first draft as I go, which works ok if I keep at it and go at a reasonable pace, because my brain likes plot and tends to work most of the weird stuff I tossed in back at the beginning back into place later on and it all mostly comes out looking like a novel.

The problem I've run into is that I have suddenly got two books where I knew where they started and where they ended up, but sort of failed to put enough middle in. Sigh.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I am one of those who have rewritten multiple novels. Sometimes, from scratch.

Why? Well, for multiple reasons.

First being that I either found the real story, or a better story while I was writing the novel the first time. Or, sometimes, what I discover are awesome characters and plot lines, but that I wrote the story I didn't want to tell.

Second being that I've developed enough as a writer that my style, voice, word choices, storytelling method are completely different from what they were.

Sometimes, I write the entire thing from scratch if there's nothing I can use from the old novel.

Sometimes, I go through the novel that needs to be rewritten and I chop out everything I don't want any more. Then, I write new book around it. After that, I do the revision thing so everything fits together and makes sense.

I haven't actually gotten past that stage and out to beta readers yet, but I'm working on it.

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

I redrafted A Returning Power from scratch. That was the first time I ever did anything past a first-draft stage on a novel, so grain of salt, etc. There are, er, a few paragraphs? that survived from the original draft into the re-draft, because I had the whole first draft saved in a different folder in that Scrivener project and could go steal stuff if there was a description I still remembered as being cool, etc., but other than that, all new wordage.

On the other hand...it took me a year to get to a place mentally where I could even approach revisions or rewrites on the first draft of ARP, hopefully partially because it was the first time I'd done the revision process on a novel. And even then, redrafting the whole thing was sort of a coping mechanism--it meant I didn't have to look at the old stuff and say "Well, this still kind of works" and then slide into the "This doesn't really work, per se, but it doesn't not-work, either..." Redrafting from scratch forced me to actually turn it into a much shorter (first draft was 80k), tighter novel.

What I did was I worked from notecards: I outlined the first draft after I'd written it--okay, so here's what actually did happen--on notecards, put them on my wall and then looked at that and tried to figure out what was useless, what was cool, what took way longer than it should have. I then re-made an outline for the book, filling in holes, tightening up the bits where it's "and then there's this weird thing where they stalk the villain to a bar and get imprisoned in the back room because I had run out of plot points" or "and then they run into this OTHER person they know from a different town who happens to be in the city...", etc. Then I had that second outline on my wall while I re-drafted, and like I said, original draft saved in a different folder in that Scrivener project.

Which was all to prevent me from having to make large-scale changes without redrafting, because that freaked me out waaay too much. (: I could recognize problems with the fabric of the first draft, but every time I thought about going through with tiny scissors and thread, I couldn't even figure out where to start. The whole interweaving-revisions-with-old-stuff thing is something I will try...with some other novel. When I am smarter, and better at writing.

[ellis bergstresser (from livejournal.com)]

I'm curious to learn the extent to which anything I've learned writing and revising this novel will be applicable to future novels. Or if process will be different for each novel I write because each novel that I write will be different and will arise in my brain for different reasons and in different ways.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

I've used the notecards as Alena described so I could shuffle them around, check for time/place/character consistency, and so forth. I've also added problem cards to the mix--things I know need changing, and where those changes need to happen.

But what I've used most often is a revision list. Before beta readers get it, I'll go through the draft slowly and note anything that seems out of place, not quite right, and dead wrong. Anything that doesn't match my internal Cool Story meter. These notes don't go on the manuscript. I make a separate list, handwritten, instead. Once I've plowed through the whole story, I look through my pages of revision notes in search of patterns--whether most of those notes deal with a certain character, worldbuilding issue, plot point, etc. That's the stage that is most important for me because it not only informs what other small changes might need ot be made, it lets me see the revisions--and the story--as a whole.

Then I revise my notes (yeah, that might sound redundant, but it works for me!) so they better address the pattern, and read the manuscript again. But this time, at the start of each chapter, I glance over the revision notes first. This helps me to both catch sections that will need to be tweaked due to revisions, and ensure the entire story will stay on track. This is where I'll also make notes in the manuscript that will work with my handwritten list--inserting comments, crossing out text, arrows to splice text together, that sort of thing. The end result is that I often have a slightly longer list of revision notes, but I've also read over them enough to internalize those notes. That's what often makes the "final" revision pass smoother.

Then I sit down with the manuscript and notes in front of me, and get to work. Whenever possible, I need to plow through revisions as quickly as possible. Otherwise I feel as if I've lost my place, and want to start over.

I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me, but I hope it helps. :)