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

[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.