How it's Going: Revisions

How it started: picture of the Road Runner

How it's going: Picture of a sloth.

I finished my first draft in May roaring to start revisions, but knew I needed coaching. I have never edited a novel. Of my writing, I have had editors who edited for very specific agendas and carved away all of the descriptions that make my writing engaging. I also took a ten year hiatus from creative writing, so part of my editing has needed coaching to remind me about creative writing elements.

I started in the summer trying to find writing groups and critique partners in the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction group. It got off to an awkward start, and the times were so late for me in Europe, that itself was not as enjoyable. A silver lining of the prolonged isolation this year has been the prevalence of in person groups going online, and that has been a god-send for me. I connected with groups in London that met at various times, and encountered people with truly impressively intelligent careers from all over the world which has brought such a wonderful diversity of perspective.

Still no one single person I could rely on to invite into my creative process. Still trying to find some freelance editor who was available for coaching and more of a monthly flat rate financial situation. One thing I was not keen on was paying several thousand for a full manuscript critique when I already knew several points where I needed to work, and I did not trust that any of them were going to understand what the book is supposed to be. For me, I told everyone on Reedsy I would pay them for a chapter or the first three, and most of that would be them getting to know me and hear what the book is supposed to be, before they touched anything.

Amazing how, mostly younger, less experienced editors had problems with this. I've spent enough time ranting about bad experiences with this group of people, so I'm going to skip that in this post. Finally I found two editors who had been in the publishing industry for twenty years. To me this meant, they had a career in an office and understood how to be professional, not trying to prove something, and that they were more mature. I started working with one in November for my first agent one on one review of my query package, and when she delivered a home run with a pitch suggestion, that was a really good sign for our relationship. Mostly, she was patient with me and focused on building a relationship first.

That's the journey to being happier with the support I've found. For my writing what has it looked like? As I said, I had my first chapter critiqued maybe four times, at least. I knew what the questions were. In fact, I was at a place where I had more questions and no solutions. Jessica helped me filter out the questions that didn't matter, and focus on some ways just to start writing layers that fixed the parts that were missing. There are some big ones like characterisation, and personality on paper. My approach for two characters is to write short stories about them, so we have been working a lot on helping me understand their personality, get more practice how that looks on paper.

Then we started looking at arcs, and she started guiding me to word choice that could perhaps foreshadow elements that would happen to that character further along. Scenes I rewrote I got stuck and rushed through, and we had to come back and dig into the purpose of certain elements, so it has slowed down my writing a lot to think on word choice. I do remember doing this in my earlier writing life, almost to a fault. The more practice we have had doing this in a few different scenes, the more natural it is becoming, and I feel less overwhelmed.

I had our efforts so far critiqued, and the opening scene still needs a boost. I had included some political answers, and the message there was people do not care when you start a book with politics. My next draft of that will change the focus of the conflict to remove the politics to make it more interesting for readers. However, I think the work done over three months qualifies as a significant revision and should be left to rest while I continue with this second draft version further along with the first act.

Have you had experience revising? What tricks help you recognise the parts that need amping up? Are there tools to focus on different areas so you don't feel overwhelmed?