How do I fit revision into my writing cycle?

August 6, 2015 9:03 AM

After twenty years of not doing so, I've started writing fiction regularly. I'm really great at keeping up with it so far: after three months of near-daily writing, I have produced several thousand words, comprising a handful of short stories. Now I've reached the point where I need to be both revising the stuff I've already written and also writing new stuff, and I'm not so good at the first part.

Since I spent so much time not writing, I'm afraid that if I take a long break to revise I'll lose my momentum. I'm also having trouble discerning whether a piece can be revised. I'm finding that after a certain amount of time, everything I write looks terrible to me.

So here are my questions: 1. Fellow writers, how do you fit revision into your writing schedule - do a little bit of each every day, alternate days, completely stop writing for days or weeks at a time while you revise? 2. How can I tell whether a given piece is terrible in a fixable way, or whether I should just put it aside?

posted by missrachael to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

Generally, I either writer or revise -- I don't start revising until I have a finished work, and while I'm revising I don't work on anything new. The exception is copyedits and line edits and other very minor revisions -- I can fit those in while working on something new. But if I'm doing a big structural edit, I don't think of myself as having completely stopped writing; rewriting fits into the process as just another kind of writing.

I wish I knew the answer to #2, having fruitlessly labored for years at a rewrite of a novel that I couldn't get to quite where my editor wanted it! But after several weeks or a month away from a piece, when I come back to it I often either see a spark or I don't. I have some idea (however vague) for a promising direction for it to go in, or I don't. It's very rare that I'd abandon a finished piece after a single draft if there was any part of me that was once excited about the idea, but if I feel very negative about a piece then sometimes I'll try writing it from the beginning without looking at the previous draft at all -- and then, once I have two different angles on the same piece, I'll figure out a third version that will work. (Obviously this is not a very efficient way to write a novel, but it's something I've done for first chapters.)
posted by Jeanne at 9:14 AM on August 6, 2015

I have two categories of unfinished work.

Column A is work that is still in flux. I haven't nailed down what exactly I want it to do, although I often have a good idea that I haven't quite begun to realize yet. The key property of Column A work is that getting feedback on it won't help me, it will only confuse me or impede my progress.

Column B is work that is not ready for publication by any means, but it's close enough to what I want it to be that feedback will help me. I submit stuff from this category to my workshop group who give me practical advice that will help me fix the problems in the story that I know exist but can't quite articulate myself.
posted by deathpanels at 9:31 AM on August 6, 2015

Best answer: I also write short fiction, and I keep my writing and revision time separate. I have a daily word count I hold myself to for three weeks straight, and then I spend the next week revising whatever first drafts I completed in that time. I personally find revising easier than generating new content, especially when I'm busy with my day job (which also involves writing), so I need writing x number of words to be my only responsibility for a stretch in order to keep myself on track.

Wanting to set something I've just written on fire is an inevitable part of my process. Some time away from the project can help, but so can having enough revision experience to identify exactly where the gap is between what I wanted to write and what's on the page, and how much work is involved in closing that gap. Proofreading and editing other people's work really helped hone those skills for me.
posted by northernish at 9:34 AM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I write in the morning and then review and revise in the afternoon. That suits my metabolism.
posted by Carol Anne at 9:34 AM on August 6, 2015

Response by poster: I think that "three weeks on - one week off" schedule might work for me, especially if I schedule the revision week to coincide with my hormonally sluggish time. I don't think I can do the "finish a thing and then don't move on until it's revised" at this point... I don't have enough of a sense of when something's "done."
posted by missrachael at 9:56 AM on August 6, 2015

I started out writing a 1,000 words a day about three years ago. After the first year, I had hundreds of thousands of words of first draft and bugger all of any real, polished quality, so I figured out pretty quick that I'd have to find a way to make revising part of my daily quota of words.

I'm long past the point now where the daily quota is a necessary discipline thing for me, but I still use it as a really good motivator. But I alternate drafting and revising, usually either month by month (month 1 draft, month 2 revise, month 3 draft) or book by book (so I write a first draft of a book, put it aside, revise the last book I wrote that's still just first draft, then go and write another book, then go back and revise the first book).

The way I do the revision is that I save out the draft as an eBook file and pop it on my Kindle, then I prop it up and I retype the whole damn thing, editing as I go. I started out hand-editing on paper and then retyping from that, but it was incredibly tedious and annoying. Retyping on the fly from an eBook works really well for me.

It's actually a really nice mental change - when you've been doing pure first draft for ages, it's lovely to take a fresh look at something you wrote a while back and start polishing and cleaning it up and adding stuff in and taking stuff out. Because I'm retyping, I count it against my quota of 1,000 words a day. One or two cycles of that later and I have a close-to-finished draft that I'll eventually do a line-by-line edit (not retyping, working directly in Scrivener*) on. I've just arrived at that point, actually, with a book I wrote the first draft of nearly a year and a half ago.

It's kind of cyclical and repetitious, but it allows me to switch gears when I'm bored or burned out and still produce a lot of first draft material, which is the feedstock for the whole process.

*If you don't already use Scrivener, you really should. It lets you structure and organise your book incredibly well and when I redraft, I can gut the file of the book of actual words but leave all the scenes and chapters in place, ready to be moved around, refilled with words and revised to death.
posted by Happy Dave at 1:31 PM on August 6, 2015