SEEING PAST THE S#@!: HOW WRITERS TACKLE REVISION
With: Lynn Coady, Martha Schabas, Scott Chantler, Ian Hamilton, Tim Sandlin, Rachel Simon and Suzannah Dunn.
As Fiction Craft continues its look “under the hood” of writing fiction, we asked seven authors to answer the question: How do you tackle revision of your work?
Revision is one of those odd beasts that no one talks much about. Maybe it’s because each author has their own method, which ultimately makes it a very personal process, but there’s not a lot of information about how people do it – and all writers do do it, even the best. There is a romantic fallacy at play in the world that dictates that if a writer is of any talent, he or she should be able to produce work of a near-perfect state on the first go. Well, as Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Revision is an essential part of the writing process and being able to see past the “shit” is vital.
An old adage says, “Write from your heart, edit from your head,” and that is about as sound a nutshell of advice as can be found on the subject of writing and revision – to a degree. When you are creating your first draft, yes, let the writing flow from the heart, and when you go back over it, yes, use the old grey matter to understand what it was your heart was up to and to sort it all out. But don’t intellectualize the work to produce what John Fowles called “an analytically arrived-at theme.” Nothing can more effectively bleed the life out of a piece of fiction.
Many people have the urge to write, but they are discouraged by their own mistakes. A person will produce a piece of work, thinking it’s just smashing as they are caught up in the moment of writing. Then they put it aside for a week or a month and when they come back to it, well, they get discouraged because all they can see are the mistakes and clumsiness – the “shit”. What they so often refuse to let themselves see are the parts that work, which is what you need to see in order to not get discouraged by the mistakes and clumsiness. This, somewhat ironically, is actually the best argument for revising with the brain, for being objective – even cold-eyed at times – when looking at your own work. Yes, see the mistakes and clumsiness, but also objectively see the stuff that works, and know that it was the same writer who produced both. The mistakes and clumsiness can be reworked (and reworked, and reworked, and reworked) until those passages read like the good stuff.
But also know that this only goes so far. When writing my novel Snakes & Ladders, I stumbled on a method for revision that suited me very well and ultimately brought the process back to the heart. I always do my best writing in the morning, and I revise in the afternoon. But after I’d done a certain amount of revision on the manuscript, I found that there were passages in the novel that my objective brain just couldn’t sort out. There was meaning in there to which the brain didn’t have access. I discovered that the best time to revise those passages was late at night, when I was extremely tired – mentally tired, that is – and all of my internal editors had shut down and gone to sleep. Only then did my actual voice – what I really wanted to say – come out without being second guessed along the way. It became a process of writing from the heart again, but on a micro scale, and those passages, perhaps not surprisingly, became the most important parts of the novel.
It was, of course, a very slow process. Since I was so tired, I could only edit a bit at a time before I needed to head off to bed. But it worked without fail. I’m not saying this is a universal cure-all for the challenge of revision. This method may not work for others, but if you are having trouble with certain passages, try it out and see what happens. Language is a visceral thing, after all, and words are formed by the flesh – lungs, vocal chords, tongue, lips, etc... – but the brain has the power to circumvent the flesh and thereby stifle words, stifle the voice. That’s why sometimes the old grey matter just needs to be put to bed.
Now, lets see how this month’s authors get past the “shit”.
LYNN COADY is the author of numerous novels including The Antagonist, Strange Heaven, Mean Boy and The Saints of Big Harbour. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
Revision happens for me in several distinct stages. I revise as I go (I hear some writers don’t do that), refining what I wrote the day before, then plunging ahead into the next bit. After I come to the novel’s end, I print it up and read everything over with pen in hand, and immediately do a second, clean-up draft, acknowledging to myself that I have no objective sense of the book at this point, so this draft will basically be a matter of crossing t’s and dotting i’s – more craft than art.
Then, depending on how insecure I’m feeling, I either let it sit a couple of months, or ask someone who is gentle-souled and considerate of my feelings to give it a read. I give these people very specific questions to answer and emphasize to them that no matter what they end up saying, every conversation relating to the manuscript has to begin with some reassuring blandishment, eg. “It’s wonderful and I loved it” – sincere or not, doesn’t matter – because I am pathetic at this stage.
Then comes some very useful insights, usually, for which I am grateful. But if the conversation goes on too long, I’ll end up scrutinizing the blandishments that I demanded be offered (sincere or no) for sincerity. Gentle-souled friend checks watch, smiles apologetically, explains he/she would really like to stay and talk more, but. It’s at this point I realize I have to cool it and forget about the book for a little while.
But first, revise again, incorporating some of the insights prompted by the kind, sagacious reader friend.
Give it another month or so.
Print it up, read it over again, pen in hand.
Draft 4.
Now maybe send it to an agent, if one is involved, or (in an ideal world) an editor with whom I already have a warm, close professional relationship, who has such fondness for my work I know she’ll be delighted to read anything I send her.
This leads to a phase of professional revising, done at the bequest of publishing folk. Usually I lose count of the drafts around this point, but I’d guess it goes through about 3 more.
(This might sound like a lot of writing, but actually it’s not, not always. Some of the changes happening from draft to draft are very minor in terms of word count. And sometimes it’s simply a matter of taking stuff out.)
Somewhere in there – usually after I get a major round of notes from my editor – occurs the “breakthrough draft” – a major revision that requires me to isolate myself for a couple of weeks (with the last book I went to my cousin Dave’s empty condo in Canmore) and do nothing but eat and sleep book. This is when the sky opens up, the angels descend and the novel reaches the fabled “next level”. It’s exhilarating. That’s the feeling you’ve been chasing all along.
Anything after that is pretty much just more crossing t’s and dotting i’s.
MARTHA SCHABAS is the author of the novel Various Positions. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Editing is all about trying to trick my brain into the kind of disinterested objectivity that a reader would have. Or as close to that as I can get. First thing is not to look at the manuscript for a few solid days. Then I change the font. The weirder the font the better; I try to pick one that I couldn’t bear to actually write in (Eurostile is good). Once you’ve exhausted all 100-odd fonts on MS Word, you can download more. This hasn’t actually happened to me yet, but I’m ready for it when it does. Then I print the whole thing off and go somewhere public to read through it – a coffee shop, a library, a park. I write at home in total silence, so a change of setting is key to the overall estrangement effect. You might consider consuming something out of the ordinary, too.
If I hate everything I read, I stop. I surmise that this has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with an insufficient transpiration of time. Of course, it might be just the font. Give it a few days and pick another one. Apple Casual is good when things look really dire.
SCOTT CHANTLER is an illustrator and the author of the books for young people The Sign of the Black Rock, Tower of Treasures, as well as the graphic novels Two Generals and Northwest Passage. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
Working in comics form makes it difficult to answer a question about revision. It's not like in prose, where revision means going in and polishing up some language or doing a bit of cut-and-paste in a word processor. There is that part of it, at least at the script stage. But most of the time you're dealing with drawn images rather than words, and drawing things takes real time. The good news is that those months or years that you spend drawing a graphic novel give you lots of opportunity to revise.
I do two or three drafts of the script, with the assistance of an editor, making the same kinds of revision that would be familiar to writers of prose. Once I start drawing, it's quick roughs, two pages to a single sheet of 8.5x11 paper. This gives me the ability to do a quick pass of the entire story, and get a lot of the thinking done about how to tackle it visually. Inevitably, I'll end up improving the storytelling over what was in the script. From there I enlarge the roughs, and lightbox them on a piece of 11x17 bristol, tightening up the drawings and, again, making tweaks that make the story more clear, more dramatic, and more appealing. Once my editor approves these pencilled pages, I ink them, retracing the pencil lines with a brush or pen, adding depth and drama using black lines and fills, once again both improving the drawings and strengthening the ideas they're meant to convey. If it's a colour book, then there's colouring to do in Photoshop. And last but not least, I add the lettering, which gives me one last opportunity to fiddle with dialogue, if need be.
I'm not sure you'd necessarily call all of that "revision", but the important thing is that each step of the process gives you the ability to improve on what you did in the previous step. And there are a lot of steps. Which hopefully results in a book that's been hammered and polished into its best possible form, both in terms of attractive drawing and lean, meaningful storytelling. Of course, my editor might still request some changes to the final artwork, and going all the way back to roughs can be a pain. But it doesn't happen too often, and as long as they're for the good of the book, I don't mind.
IAN HAMILTON is the author of numerous novels including The Discipline of Las Vegas and The Water Rat of Wanchai. He lives in Burlington, Ontario.
For me, revising all starts with getting my head into the right place. And what I mean by that is accepting that the work should and can be improved, and that my editor’s substantive edit is pointing me in the right direction.
When I got the edit for the first book it was a bit of a shock because she – the great Janie Yoon – wanted substantial changes. It took three days of thinking before I came to grips with the fact that she was right. Then it was a matter of executing.
I also decided, early on, that I didn’t want to gerrymander or piecemeal changes. If the change Janie wanted was major, then I would discard entire sections and write entirely new ones. For example, in The Water Rat of Wanchai, I threw out the last 80 pages from the draft that House of Anansi initially bought and wrote a completely new 140 pages.
I’m lucky in another regard in that I tend to be very self-critical. When I write the first few drafts of a book, I’m more concerned about telling a story than achieving any kind of perfection. My attitude is I can always go back and tighten and trim, or expand. But I want to get the story told first. So when I revise, I’m not only focused on my editor’s requests, I’m also reading line by line and making changes I think improve my book. And I do that from page one on. I read and re-read every page, every line, whether the editor has marked it or not.
TIM SANDLIN is the author of numerous novels including Lydia, Western Swing and Sorrow Floats. He lives in Jackson, Wyoming.
Revision is a vague word. Is it the total change of every element, such as you do with a screenplay when the vice president of development (an entry level job in Hollywood) justifies his job by giving you notes insisting you make the mother an alcoholic, the child a chimpanzee and move the setting to Greece? Or is it the final draft fix where you perfect each word. One hundred thousand words and every one of them must be considered in relation to every other word. A change on page 56 means you must rewrite page 356. Or is it something in between?
For our purposes here, let’s think of it as a draft. Here’s how I write, more or less: I write two pages a day, but those two pages are hand written on a yellow legal pad three times, then rewritten on my Mac computer once. So, I’ve written each two pages four times before I go on to the next two pages. (Or you could say seven times because I closely read each page before rewriting it, but, at this point maybe it’s better not to count the edits.)
Then the next day, I go on to the next two pages, never looking back at what I’ve written — or to be honest, rarely looking back at what I’ve written — until the entire first draft of the novel is finished.
Then I wait a couple weeks and start over. I do this three times. Early in my career, I wrote four pages a day, first draft, two pages a day, second draft, and six pages a day, third draft. Now, I shoot for two a day every draft, but I recommend the early career method over what I do now.
First draft I get it all on paper — what Annie Lamott calls the shitty first draft. It’s easier to fix something than to create, so get down the mess and straighten it out later. As a gross generalization, second draft is where things get added and third draft is where things come out. So, by the time a book is finished, I’ve written every sentence, by hand, a minimum of nine times. Usually a lot more. I can look at a sentence and tell you the other eight ways it was written. What I can’t do is tell you whether or not the sentence actually made it into the book.
The revision itself is a cross between controlled daydreaming and paying attention to details. These are two characteristics that, on the surface, conflict, which is why not everyone can rewrite a novel. I think the ability to revise is a developmental issue, like talking at thirteen months and walking at fifteen. You can’t force it before its time. Beginners have trouble with rewriting, but experienced novelists will often tell you revisions are the most creative and fun part of writing. I’ll tell you that.
Although most successful novelists will not admit that anything about writing is fun. So, you may take my wisdom with the clichéd grain of salt.
RACHEL SIMON is the author of the novels The Story of the Beautiful Girl and The Magic Touch, as well as the story collection Little Nightmares, Little Dreams. Her memoir Riding the Bus with My Sister was adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame film. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware.
When I began to write, I dreaded the concept of revision. I saw it as a sign of creative failure, an indication that I just didn’t have what it takes.
This dread went on for many years. Up until the end of high school, I made no distinction between first drafts and final drafts, but then, seeing how far my work had to go to achieve publishable standards, I fell into despair – and a writer’s block. When I finally returned to writing in my mid-twenties, the idea of revision was so formidable that I couldn’t bear to dip my toe in it for another four years of first drafts. Only after yet another four years – a full two years after the publication of my first book – did I come to view revision as a familiar, compassionate friend whose company I enjoyed.
The main thing that helped me shift from fearing to enjoying revision was not a secret guide to how to improve paragraphs or make decisions about point of view or strengthen character arcs. My lack of knowledge about the mechanics wasn’t the problem. It was my emotions that had been getting in the way. Since I was seeing revision as a sign of creative failure, I wasn’t allowing myself to try even one solution, let alone one after another after another, until eventually I began to get somewhere. I was also so untrusting of my own inner creative compass that I’d become highly reliant on other people, even if their sensibility had little resemblance to mine. Once I realized that my own fear was keeping me from developing my work, I took steps to set the fear aside and just get going.
I could write whole chapters on revision (and in fact I have, in The Writer’s Writing Guide, which is now available free here: rachelsimon.com/tips). But basically, I write my first drafts by hand, then put them on the computer, and from then on I revise, possibly for a year or two. My initial revisions are on the largest scale possible; I look at whether the piece works from beginning to end, is well-paced, has sufficient character development, and is written in a consistent voice. Then I move into smaller and smaller units of focus, from the chapter to the section to the paragraph to the sentence, looking at such things as transitions, metaphors, dialogue, word choice, and rhythm.
I do all this with a great deal of patience, since sometimes each round of revision takes days or weeks longer than I’d like. I also do all my work in privacy, so I can push my work to its highest level before bringing someone else in. It’s not that I don’t value the opinions of the handful of trusted readers I’ve come to rely on over the years. It’s that I don’t see the point in my wasting their time, because if they’re just going to tell me what I already know, then I might as well address it before showing them.
Of course, once I’ve shown my work to my trusted readers, I still revise more. My goal is to get the work to a level of sophistication that I couldn’t have imagined when I began, and to achieve something so absorbing and seamless that the reader can fall into it on the first page and not want to leave until she’s finished.
I know I’ve achieved my goal when I put out a new book and get emails from readers that say, “You kept me up all night!” Then I think, “Hurrah!” And I make a little toast to revision.
SUZANNAH DUNN is the author of numerous novels and short-fiction collections, including The Confession of Katherine Howard, The Queen’s Sorrow, The Sixth Wife, and Commencing Our Descent. She lives in Shropshire, UK.
There's no distinct phase of 'revision', for me: I revise as I go along, word by word, line by line, section by section; that's what writing is, for me. On-going revision. I don't write a chunk (or, sadly, even a sentence) and then go back to revise it. I don't know what other writers mean when they talk of 'drafts'. But I wish I did! - I don't think this constant, on-going revision (a kind of one-step-forwards-and-two-steps-back) helps me. It's a slow process - if one can dignify it as a 'process' - which is demoralising (and morale is, of course, at least half the battle, novels being lengthy projects). And it's disruptive to narrative flow.
I've been trying to do it differently, this time; I promised myself, after the sheer horror of crawling through the last one, that I'd do it differently. I decided to go ahead - press ahead - and scrawl a lot of notes, pretty much a novel's-worth of notes, before sitting down to put it into (...endlessly revised...) sentences. I wanted to be able to see the narrative arc at all times; I felt I wouldn't then 'get stuck' (fiddling about with a couple of words for days on end) as I've always previously done, but would somehow be swept forward. Energised! Anyway, depressingly, I have to report that it hasn't worked! (Sorry, I'm not being much use, here, am I.) I don't know why, but I'm as stuck on this novel-in-progress as I've ever been on any previous one. (Oh well, it was worth a try.) (Or was it?)
The endless fiddling about with words and sentences distracts me from where the revision ought to be happening - and does eventually have to happen - which is on the levels of character development and story development. Again, though, I don't wait until I have a 'draft' in hand before I go back over what I've written (not least because it simply won't have been possible to get to the end if the character- and story developments aren't right). Eventually, I'll get tripped up by, say, (and this is a classic, for me), my narrator being too much of an observer, not having enough of a story of her own. (Major revision, there, then!) Also, within particular scenes, or parts of a scene, there will of course be elements (observations, sentiments, snatches of dialogue, whatever) that have been imported, or dragged along, kind of unnoticed, from many-revisions-ago. I've learned that whenever a scene just isn't working, that's usually the reason; and even though I will have considered myself to have been properly vigilant all along, I do need to go back yet again with a fresh - ruthless - eye, and ask myself what exactly it is that I'm aiming to show and/or have happen. And often it'll takes ages - days - to spot what it is, what's just not quite right in a scene or section. Layers do accumulate, don't they, and - because they've taken so much of your time and energy, they've been lain down with such care - they're very convincing.
Come to think of it, all revision does boil down to that, for me: the asking of myself (word by word, line of dialogue by line of dialogue, scene by scene, section by section), Is this really, really, really how it would be?
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Read past editions of Fiction Craft:
July 2011: How do you approach research for your fiction?
June 2011: How do you make your characters come alive?
May 2011: Where do your stories come from?
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Shaun Smith is the author of the YA novel Snakes & Ladders and the e-book Magical Narcissism: Selected Writings on Books, Writers, Food & Chefs. He has published journalism with CBC.ca, Quill & Quire, The Toronto Star and numerous other outlets. His book blog "Shaun Smith's Sunday Sundries" appears each Sunday (no kidding!) on Open Book Toronto.
Follow Shaun on Twitter.
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