Quirk

“… Consider for a moment what you’re doing when you “fine-tune” your prose. You’re really removing the sense of a “writer” from the work, so that the only thing of which a reader is aware is the imaginative world of the story.”
– David Kaplan, in Revision: A Creative Approach

I’ve finished my third novel, in a science-fiction trilogy of stories widely separated in time and characters. The only continuity between the stories is that of history and legend.

I’m working on revising it. It can be difficult although I agree revision is the soul of writing, as Kaplan says in his book.

I have difficulty to figure out what to cut though. I tend to over-write. The first draft was a good 5000 words longer than it is now. That is almost a minor amount compared to what I had to do with the first two novels.

Revising Before Writing

But I’m happy that I spent a lot of time on what Kaplan calls “revising before writing.”

“If, as I have suggested, revising is discovering what we really want to say, not just how to say it, then we can revise our stories by mulling and pondering them before we even sit down to do the first draft.”

To develop a slate of characters, especially the main one, who needs to yearn for something meaningful, to figure out how to thwart that yearning in dramatic ways, to trace a rough sequence of culminating story events, to imagine settings that will enliven those events, and to find an ending that resonates – there is a wide net to cast.

You have to be alert to your internal cues about what might work, and be open to the serendipity of outside influences.

There may be significant research necessary, as in my case learning more about space elevators and synthetic biology.

I’m not talking about comprehensive outlining, or meticulously trying to put in the right “beats” that some craft authority dictates. Those tend, for me anyway, to deaden the imaginative exploration of the actual writing. (I’ve written about this before in, for example, Recently Found Tools for Writing Novels and A Tale of Two Books on Writing Novels.)

Although front-end planning helps a great deal with back-end revising, you have to be careful about planning to a fare-thee-well as a way to procrastinate. Especially worldbuilding. I’ve been guilty of this.

What Works for Me

I’m going to lay out what works for me after three novels. Every writer’s process is different, and I should note, I haven’t published anything yet. But still I think there may be value in this for others finding their way.

So, the first draft is finally done. Congratulations. Time to take a break. Let the project marinate in its own juices for awhile. I’ve paused for several months down to, this time, barely two weeks. It probably should have been longer. The main consideration is to have enough time for what you’ve written to go a little foggy. Enough so that when you pick it up again, there is a hint of freshness, and one hopes, objectivity, in your first read-through.

Read the whole thing, as if for the first time. Take notes on everything problematic you find, and where it is, but don’t change anything yet except obvious typos. There will likely be continuity errors, subplots that don’t work, characters who are unnecessary, superfluous dream sequences, backstory that goes on and on, and a myriad of other faults and considerations that come to light.

Set up a spreadsheet or other way to keep track: list the novel’s scenes from beginning to end. For me, I don’t think that much about scenes when I write the first draft. I’ve got characters in conflict with much at stake, and a direction to go. To keep it interesting for myself, I bang them against each other frequently, and – voila! – scenes!

Spreadsheet of Scenes

The spreadsheet list of scenes at revision becomes a really important reference.

For the columns I use the following (others may have better or additional categories): scene number, scene descriptor, page nos., chapter number, setting, named characters in scene, whose point of view (POV), goal/intent for POV character, motivation about goal, conflict/tension, difficulty/problem the scene ends with, character’s fear factor, structural, and notes.

“Structural” is mainly about whether a scene is truly necessary. Sometimes this becomes apparent right away, and sometimes only after you work more with the revision. Or maybe a scene needs to be moved to a different place, in time or geography.

The spreadsheet takes some time to fill out with what is now maybe just your second read-through.

Then comes the painful task of excising scenes, and possibly characters, that don’t actively contribute to the story. Occasionally I have to fill in some bits to clarify or make the story and characters more interesting.

The Helpful Synopsis

An important part of revision which may be overlooked is the usefulness of a two or three page synopsis: a summary of all the events and important characters as they progress through the story. This can make apparent distressing gaps, especially about causality.

And as Sandra Scofield puts it in her book The Last Draft: “A big part of revision is deepening the story. You can start by deepening the summary.”

The discipline of condensing this world you’ve created into such a short form is extremely helpful. It’s also often necessary to do when approaching literary agents with queries, so you might as well get an early start on it.

After that I refer to my copious notes from that first read-through, and fix.

Then I put the novel chapters into an inexpensive program called Hemingway Editor to review readability and highlight all the many adverbs, adjectives and uses of passive voice. Often these clutter the clean lines of a sentence. It takes time to evaluate the necessity of each word.

The most useful aspect of the program is how it brings over-long and awkward sentences to my attention. I like the occasional flowing long sentence, it comes natural to me, but I tend to overdo it.

I toyed with having an AI voice read the novel to me, but I gave up on that when I realized how stilted and artificial the available voices are. All rhythm in the sentence is lost. With the last novel, I read the work out loud to myself, but I found that time-consuming exercise didn’t help me as much as I anticipated.

Unnecessary Words

So then, with advice from craft books, using the Find function, I examined and often deleted every instance of such words and phrases as “really,” “rather,” “quite,” “suddenly”, “starting to,” “looked at” and many more. (Two helpful books on this, including more general revision advice, are: Novel Revision Prompts by Rayne Hall, and The Novel Editing Workbook by Kris Spisak.)

Then comes serious line editing. This time I’ve worked in two directions. The first way is start at the end and work backwards sentence by sentence. This does allow better focus, I found, on each sentence: rhythm, flow, and fitting word choice.

Then at roughly the same time, I start at the beginning and examine each sentence from there. This allows more sense of the story to inform the sentence. Further adjustments may be necessary.

That’s pretty well the end of my process, although no doubt I’ll go back from time to time and see what I’m not satisfied with.

As you may appreciate, this all takes patience and a considerable amount of time.

I aspire to what Kaplan describes above: to allow the reader to sink into the story without hindrance, to enter for awhile the dream you’ve built and know that it was good.

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