I just finished revising my most recent novel—the sequel to my award-winning YA debut Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze—so revision is a topic that’s been sort of dominating my mind, and my time, lately. And, of course, when I say “finished revising,” I don’t really mean finished. I mean merely taking a pause from actively revising while my first batch of beta readers read the mess I’ve made so far and, hopefully, help me un-mess it. At which point I will go back to revising.
But living in revision land has gotten me thinking about the nature of novel revision.
A few questions have been percolating:
What is revision?
Why do we do revise and what do we hope to achieve?
How do we revise?
How long we revise for?
I’m fascinated by this topic, namely because I suspect that revision is a bit different for every writer. But I also suspect that many writers are especially daunted by revision because they lack an effective revision system built to actually push their novel from decent to good, or from good to very good, or perhaps even from very good to great. I don’t think I’ve written a great book yet, but I know that I’ve been able to dramatically improve as a writer by becoming a better reviser.
What I think would be fun is a series of posts that look at different aspects of revision, both the nature of it, and the actual execution of it.
Let’s start with a big question: What is revision?
Perhaps this sounds almost too obvious to ask, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard, let alone tried to answer, this question before. Have you?
I’ve actually never even noticed that the word revision can be broken down as “re” and “vision.”
On one level, then, we might call revision the process of “re” visioning something that is in a state of completion or near completion. But then, what the hell does it mean to “re” vision something? Is it about making it better? Making it simply different? Making it fit better within a set or criteria (audience, genre, age group)?
Over time, I’ve come to think of revision as a conversation, or series of conversations, we have with something we wrote. To become better revisers, we must first accept that the act of writing comes with the reality that whatever we just wrote is (at least somewhat) different than the thing we initially set out to write. And probably less successful than what we intended. The spark of writing a story starts with an idea, but as we pursue that idea, the idea itself changes as we explore it. Thinking about making something and actually making that something are as different as reading about getting wet and getting thrown in a pool.
Revision is so baked into the writing process that we start teaching pre-schoolers how to revise their work. And it’s a given, especially in novel writing, that no one gets it right the first time. But why? Why can’t you get it right the first time? Why can’t you plan and outline and intend your way around screwing it up? I think it’s something to do with the fact that an idea alone cannot guide you to the promised land. Only by going out there in the wind and rain can you hope to reach it. That pursuit requires a million high-stakes micro decisions that dreaming up the idea did not. In dreaming, the stakes are far lower. As you make those decisions, you inevitably alter your original course bit by bit. Additionally, the brain simply can’t give equal weight to the actual act of writing and the act of evaluating that writing at the same time. Not fully, anyway. Further, and maybe the best part, is that you just don’t need to. Part of the fun of writing a first draft is the freedom.
Translation: fuck the typos. I’ll fix them later!
So, what is revision?
Let’s get back to the idea of a conversation. We finish writing a story, and as we read and start to evaluate it, we converse with our story. We ask it questions:
What are you?
What are you trying to be?
How close are you to actually being that thing?
What needs to happen to bridge the gap between your current self and the best version of yourself?
(How much will this hurt? And how many years will it take off my life?)
Revision is the pursuit of answering these questions.
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