the obliqueness of the revision process
Jan. 17th, 2012 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateSo, I'm revising this novel. This is the first time I've actually done that, rather than collect some feedback, poke at it, and put everything away to percolate indefinitely. It helps that my critical brain has begun to catch up with my reader-brain, after finally coming around from hating analysis for the kind of interpretations forced upon one in literature classes, often dealing with works I didn't much care for anyway. It helps that I now have writer-friends who have also developed critical skills tuned to editing rather than analysis, and who are willing to do beta reading. It also helps that I seem to have achieved some kind of state of zen where I don't really get much fussed about people mucking with my prose!!! or insulting it or whatever it is that people get all upset about. Good editing is helpful, even when it's telling you things you don't want to know about.
In any case, it's the process of revisions from feedback that I'm presently finding fascinating. There's a lot of having a beta reader say something which sets off my brain in a chain of "No, that's not right, because..." and sorting out the themes and meta things that I hadn't even realized I'd put in before. Once I know what it is I'm trying to do, I can write all that down in my notebook and go back and try to make it so that other people will see that, too. So the fact that one of my beta readers wants to be reading an action-adventure novel and doesn't care for my kitchen scene causes me to write "THIS IS A DOMESTIC FANTASY" in the margin of my notebook, and this is actually helpful. (It's also given me some useful bits to work into the mess that is presently book two, when I get there, and a reminder about this not being a travellog of wandering the woodlands.) It's possible that no one else will actually consider it a domestic fantasy, because it's also adventure and coming of age, but the important part is that this is how the narrator sees the world, and what she does with it.
Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.
In any case, it's the process of revisions from feedback that I'm presently finding fascinating. There's a lot of having a beta reader say something which sets off my brain in a chain of "No, that's not right, because..." and sorting out the themes and meta things that I hadn't even realized I'd put in before. Once I know what it is I'm trying to do, I can write all that down in my notebook and go back and try to make it so that other people will see that, too. So the fact that one of my beta readers wants to be reading an action-adventure novel and doesn't care for my kitchen scene causes me to write "THIS IS A DOMESTIC FANTASY" in the margin of my notebook, and this is actually helpful. (It's also given me some useful bits to work into the mess that is presently book two, when I get there, and a reminder about this not being a travellog of wandering the woodlands.) It's possible that no one else will actually consider it a domestic fantasy, because it's also adventure and coming of age, but the important part is that this is how the narrator sees the world, and what she does with it.
Xposty from dreamwidth, but yes, I'm still here.