Welcome to Part 2 in my extended foray into novel revision. What it is, why we do it, and how we do it. You can read Part 1 (What is Revision) right here to get caught up.
I thought we’d risk a second consecutive theoretical question about revision before we get to the juicy practical stuff. I actually find these broad questions about revision clarifying and interesting to ponder, and I hope you do too.
Part 2 is focused on the question: Why do we revise?
Why indeed.
I suspect that for most of us, we revise for two reasons:
We’ve been taught that we must.
What we just wrote is crap and we know, at least on some level, that we have to change some of the words to make it less crappy.
But neither of these reasons gets at the heart of something super important for the reviser to understand: what we hope to achieve when we revise. We tend to do it because it’s just what you do. We write something, and then we re-write it again and again to make it better. What else is there, right? Fine. Yes. But how many of us go into revision with a reason—a true sense of why? Or with an actual plan to execute on that why? As opposed to, you know, drifting aimlessly toward a blurry target marked “better story” which we can kind of see out there in the fog somewhere.
The answer to why we revise actually depends on the thing we’re writing. This is helpful to think about because it means that not all revision is created equal. Different writing situations, and different stages in the writing process, require different types of revision.
For our purposes—figuring out “why” we revise, I’m thinking of the first round of revision on a novel. And yes, there will be multiple rounds if we’re doing it right. But for now, let’s keep some distance from fine tuning and focus on initial revision.
My day job is as a copywriter for a creative agency and most often I’m writing and revising in pursuit of a client’s particular vision of a story. I’m fine with this. It’s actually easier because the hardest thing in creativity is actually knowing what you want. Writing things isn’t that hard. It’s figuring out what they should really be and what will make them the best version o
f themselves that’s the hardest part. At least for me. As a copywriter, I rely on briefs where a client spells out, with varying levels of clarity, what the story is they’re trying to tell, who the audience is, how long it should be, etc. I then write and revise in pursuit of that target. Having their directive is clarifying for me as a writer and usually helps me hit the target faster and more accurately. And, spoiler alert, the worse the brief, or the foggier the client feels about what they actually want, the longer the process, and the less successful the outcome. This sounds kind of obvious, but trust me, it happens ALL THE TIME.
I would encourage us as fiction writers to pursue a similar level of clarity about what we want our story to be before we start revising. This “what” will probably change and evolve, of course, and that’s fine, but I think most of us are a bit like that client who knows they want something, but just doesn’t quite know what.
See if this sounds familiar.
We write something, be it a short story or chunk of a novel. Or even an entire novel. Then, when we’re finished, we read it and read it and read it, making small tweaks with each reading. These tweaks tend to be focused on language. Improving descriptions. Choosing more muscular nouns and verbs. Picking the perfect color eyes for that quirky minor character. Obsessing over the first and last line. We just keep tweaking, hoping it will get better. And, to be sure, this method will yield some good results, especially if we’re writing a short story where our story’s entirety is easier to grasp in a single sitting. A short story is usually short enough that we can hold the whole thing in our head. Novels are not like that. Novels are winding roads that curl and bend out of view. There’s no way to hold the entirety of a novel in our head at one time, which means we can’t revise a novel from the gut. We need a plan.
What if, instead of just revising randomly, tweaking words and bits of dialogue here and there and hoping for gradual improvement, we approached our novel like a client would a brief? Think about it. A client’s time is valuable, so it’s way better if they can get clear on what they want before they ask a writer to sit down and do it. Another advantage the client has is that they’re somewhat emotionally detached from the product itself because they only have to conceive of what it is, not do the creative toil of bringing it to life. They can be dispassionate about its cosmetic elements and focus instead on its true purpose for being. Of course, these two sides (client and writer) are far more intertwined than I’m making them sound here, but I’m dramatizing in order to highlight their differences.
Try this:
Read the first draft of your novel not with an eye for what you’d like to tweak, or even wondering what’s working or not working, but with an even bigger question: what is this novel’s reason for existing? What is it really about? And then, ask: How close or far is it to actually being that thing? Asking big questions like this at first, as opposed to smaller questions such as “is this scene working?” or “is this description successful?” will help us consider the size and scale of revision we have in front of us. We will still have to ask all those smaller questions, and multiple times, but not yet.
Only by asking the big questions up front can we get to the true “why” of revision. That is, making our story the very best version of itself that it can be, and how big or small the scale of revision work we have in front of us.
This brings us to an important part of the revision process: reading.
Careful revision is careful reading. If you don’t have time for careful reading, you don’t have time for careful revising.
We’ll get more into this when we start talking about “how” we actually revise. But if we don’t read our work through an editor’s eyes, or think with the client side of our brain, we’re short changing how good our novel can be. If we don’t scrutinize our work and hold its feet to the fire, or reconcile with the possibility that our novel is far-far away from being the best version of itself, we’ll find ourselves perpetually lost in Tweakville, changing words here and there, moving bits of dialogue around, pretending we’re doing the real work of making our story better when we’re actually just sort of walking in circles and hoping for the best.
Finally, let’s talk about the final ingredient in “why” we revise: love. Love is the secret sauce of revision. We revise because we love our story. We love it enough that we know it deserves the chance to become its best self, and that it’s going to take a lot of work and patience to get it there. But we also know it’s worth it because we feel the love.
Phew. If you made it this far, this is me giving you a hug.
Until next time.