Day 11: The Writing on the Wall

Back in February, I wrote a new manuscript. It’s part of a Big Secret Project my agent Carrie and I have been talking about quite a bit this year. The manuscript is shorter than what I typically write, and because the ideas came so blessedly fast, I finished off the first draft in three weeks. Carrie and I talked about it a few weeks after that, once she’d had time to read it. Happily we both felt pretty good about it. At the end of our conversation she said something along the lines of, “If you wrote it in three weeks, you can probably get the revisions done in three more. Does that sound about right?”

I remember thinking, “Ah ha ha, I sure hope you’re joking.” By way of comparison for anyone who has read the manuscript for FOLLOWING INFINITY: We worked through revisions for that over the better part of a year.

Between conversations I have throughout the day with different people and things I post on social media, there are likely a good number of people who might not be completely sure what revision work is, or at least how I do it. Since I need an idea to fill another one of these May posts, I thought I’d give you a brief look into how painstakingly frustrating this work can be.

First of all, let’s start some basic definitions:

Writing: Taking an idea and growing it into a story. This can be done on paper, on a screen, or just in your brain. I see creative writing as a mental activity, not a physical one.

Editing: Fixing mistakes. Getting rid of the typos and spelling errors, cleaning up the grammar, correcting any electronic formatting mistakes. Trying to make the work you’ve done come across as more professional and easier for people to read and understand.

Revising: Making hundreds, if not thousands, of changes to the original writing to improve it. This could be anything from deleting an unnecessary word to reinventing the role of a specific character to adding four or five brand new chapters. Remember that year of FOLLOWING INFINITY revisions? Yeah. New chapters and re-imagined characters all over the place there, to say nothing of deleted words. And characters.

So, moving forward with those things in mind, here’s a very small peek at the new manuscript, and a quick example of the work that goes into revision. For our purposes today, I selected a random paragraph, only chosen because I had already included an editorial note of my own.

I wrote the manuscript more or less as a full first draft, and only went back to do one quick edit before sending it to Carrie. Carrie is a terrifyingly editorial agent, which is actually a good thing, mostly because it keeps me from stressing about making things perfect before I send them to her. I want to her to see the best I can do, but I also know she’s going to find things for me to work on that otherwise never would have occurred to me. Ninety-seven out of a hundred times she’ll be right.

Here you see today's paragraph, pretty close to it’s original state:

This paragraph happens early in the story. It's about two boys, our narrator Kevin and his classmate/rival Charles. Since this manuscript is shorter than the length I’d typically work with it requires a lot of economy. For example, this paragraph has to do these things: help establish that the main character, Kevin (unnamed in this paragraph) has a lot of experience climbing trees; showing Kevin is being challenged by other boys acting as allies against him; showing that his competitor, Charles, is both fairly athletic but probably a less-experienced tree climber; illustrating that the boys have already climbed pretty high.

Now, that highlighted blue box? That’s an editorial comment I left myself. Something about the section I highlighted didn’t work the way I wanted. I usually don’t fix these comments as I spot them because when I’m proofreading during revision, my brain is focused more on finding what to improve than how to improve. Here’s the comment:

So we know Bradley is somewhere on the bad boy spectrum between being a simple jerk and a full-on bully; he isn’t cheering for Charles to be supportive as much as he is to get in Kevin’s head. More importantly, I want to show that Charles got involved in this more for the challenge of climbing the tree and less to put Kevin in his place. This is a moment that will need to establish a lot of groundwork quickly in defining these characters: Bradley, the mouthy punk who tried to climb the tree and failed is now supporting Charles because it’s the only way he has left to come out on top; Kevin is someone easily baited, which Bradley knows; Kevin is very aware of where Charles is during the climb, and it’s important to him to be the first to reach the branch they’re climbing for; Charles is friends with Bradley, so he could be a similarly antagonizing character by association, but in this moment he’s more focused on trying to achieve a goal than trying to win a race. Charles has a lot of internal motivation.

As I reviewed this, I noticed something else, and added this highlighting:

The first red section? It’s about climbing the tree, and Kevin comparing himself to Charles. The second red section? Kevin again comparing himself to Charles. This tells me that either I should move one of these sections to connect them as one continuous idea, or find a way to rewrite them completely so both sections are part of the same idea. Great. Another thing to fix.

The last sentence in the paragraph right now seems okay. It references an earlier moment when Bradley accidentally tore his hockey jacket while trying to climb, and foreshadows things to come by highlighting that Kevin and Charles are already pretty high up, even though they still haven’t reached their goal. So, one sentence out of six that doesn’t need any work. That actually isn’t such a bad batting average.

Just to give some resolution to this post, here’s a revised version of this paragraph which hopefully fixes some of the things I wanted to address. I say “a revised version” because it’s entirely possible, if not likely, that more changes will still be coming.

There you go, a little insight into the lunacy of the revision process. I hope some people found it interesting. One paragraph down, only about 312 more to do. Wish me luck!