Great read. A couple of my own works have also turned out almost the opposite of what I intended them to be thanks to revision.
Sometimes I think the worst thing a new writer can do is believe in "the first draft is always crap". Then they get to the revision 'stage' and become so disheartened the ms ends up in the drawer. Not to say it doesn't work for many writers, but when people say, as mentioned in the article, that the final version is nothing like the original, I can't help but think they could have saved themselves some trouble if they'd just written the new story to begin with...
I think if the first draft doesn't have terrible mistakes, it should be built upon, not discarded. Usually my draft is good in terms of grammar, so that's not the problem for me. IMO, rewrites are necessary for fixing plot points, or when you want to write the same scene focusing on different things, or to fix cheese.
This is an interesting article, but I'm not sure how much it applies to most of us. There are a great many more writers working today than in the nineteenth century (for example), and the increase in publishing opportunities (at least until the advent of the internet, with its blogs and self-publishing) have not kept pace. There's more competition today than ever before between writers who seek traditional publication. This means we have to write as well as we possibly can in order to be considered for publication. In the nineteenth century, writers could get away with being fairly lousy. That's probably the main reason so few nineteenth-century writers have survived. Spontaneity does not always equal quality, or even basic publishability. Go ahead and cite Kerouac and the other Beats all you like; their movement has not survived. Beat writing was new and different in the Fifties, but now it seems like a batch of somewhat interesting fossils. We're back to revising because it works. Also, some writers (like me) discover their stories and their meanings as they write. Didn't somebody once say "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" That applies to me and to many others like me. My first draft teaches me what my story is really about, and it winds up being a huge mess because I was going in too many different directions with it. I treat it the way a sculptor treats a block of marble: the story is in there somewhere, and I have to chisel it out. That's what revision is. Another analogy I like is from John Gardner: He said writing is like digging into rock mining for iron; if your pickaxe turns up a nugget of silver, you'd be foolish not to follow the silver and forget the iron. Whether or not to revise also depends, I think, on the writer's habits of thought. My guess is that in the old days, when paper and ink were expensive, writers would stare into space, assembling their sentences and maybe whole paragraphs in their heads before setting their pens to paper. They took their time, working their ideas, their imagery, and their prose in their heads so they'd only have to write it once. Now, we just dive right in and spew our stuff as fast as we can, knowing we'll fix everything in later drafts. I guess there are some writers, albeit very few, who can write well with barely any revision. Most of us, though, have to work a little harder.
Thank you for sharing! I love reading about stuff like this. I self-published a novel when I was 19. I started writing it when I was 13. I pretty much tweaked the first draft and that was it. I felt like revision and all that extra stuff that would never get published was a waste of time. Now, looking back at it (when I can stomach it), I think it's serious cr*p. Of course, it could've just been because of my age and immaturity at the time of writing rather than the lack of revising. There's no way of knowing. Either way, I'm a huge proponent of both things I felt were a waste of time. I feel they make things so much better. I think revision can be overdone, though. I'm not sure there's ever really a point when we can stop and say, "This is perfect." There will always be something that we feel needs to be tweaked, expanded, contracted, rewritten, reworded, etc. Has anyone ever reached a point where they felt their work had reached perfection and not just decided it was sufficiently good?
I think one has to distinguish between revising after writing the whole thing first, and revising as it's being written. Not waiting until the whole thing is done doesn't have to mean it's crap, and it doesn't mean less work. It just means we don't end up with that "huge mess" when we finish the last page. I really don't think the discussion is about revision per se but about when to do it, and how much. If I write a novel with the foregone conclusion that I'm going to heavily edit afterwards, it makes no sense to me to even start. Why not write the novel I want the first time?
Hurray! You've finished your 1st draft. It stinks (of course it does unless you're God). I wanted to ask what your revision or rewriting process is. Do you save a copy of the first draft then revise and edit within that copy? Do you print out the 1st draft, make notations and the rewrite on a new document? Do you start fresh without referring to the original draft? Just wanted to see what writingforum's process is when making the second draft and other subsequent drafts. I'm experimenting on my revision process. Before, I would notate everything on a print out of my first draft. Once I've made my notes and strikeouts, I would duplicate the 1st draft in my laptop, rename it "2nd draft" and then work on that file, following the notes I made on the print out. It felt like a rigid process. Since the 1st draft is right on the screen, I'm tempted not to cut out some stuff since it would mean I have to rewrite everything down below, which means deleting them. On my current experiment, I just make my notes on the print out and create a new and blank document for the 2nd draft. What I noticed is that I'm rewriting the story radically. The story has the same spine, but the style is so distinct. The notes and marks I made on the print out felt like it was in vain, but I still use it as a guideline and a suggestion. Anyway, I'm not sure if this process I'm trying out will bear fruit. I know everyone has a different process, but I would like to know what your revision process is.
i finish a first draft, set it aside for a day or longer, then go back and edit it... a book might take several edits before i consider it polished and ready to submit... at least one edit will be done on a print-out [for a book, 2 or more], as it's too easy to miss problems on the screen and sitting down in a comfy chair/sofa/bed with the pages and a red pen will give a fresh perspective... to save ink and paper, when i print an editing copy, i narrow the margins, switch to 1.5 line spacing, and use 'draft' quality for the printer...
First misconception - the first draft does not have to stink and you don't have to be God for that. My revision process is to make it right the "first time" - ie, I revise as I go. There are no plot holes because what happens next depends on what happened before, for example. I use betas on a chapter by chapter basis, so I haven't written 40-odd chapters only to have my betas tell me I screwed up Chapter 3 and the rest of the story makes no sense because of it. I read each chapter out loud (usually several times) when done for editing purposes before it goes to the betas. One final read-through for polishing and done.
Oooh, good suggestion. I will definitely do that when I finish my 1st draft. I have, up until this project, been one to plow through until the first draft is finished, then let it sit, then go back and begin the long editing process. But with my current project, I have found myself changing course a couple of times, and it was necessary to do some fairly significant editing as I went (so I wouldn't lose track of what I wanted to change when I made the decision). Even now, I am making some mental notes about what I will have to change when I go into full edit mode (@shadowwalker would probably say, "Just edit as you go starting now and get it done", but that won't work, either, because I'll get too engrossed in making all the changes now that I'll lose focus on where the thing is going; besides, with only a couple of chapters to go, I might as well get to the end of the first draft).
When I write a first draft, I see it as a first attempt at a final draft. As in, I try to hit it as close to the mark as I can. I know it won't be exactly right, but I also know it won't be a pile of garbage hastily thrown together, either. But it will definitely need revising and editing, if only to sharpen the writing and trim the fat (I often overwrite, because I find it much easier to cut than to pad). Once I finish a first draft I set it aside and go into full revision mode on everything I have. I'll go through and do a reread of each of my other novels and do a new draft for each one, saving my newest for last. This includes converting to MS format if not already done, making any content changes I noted along the way, and most importantly tightening the prose and making everything read better. Then each draft will need time to sit before it's ready to be redrafted, so I write a new first draft. And the cycle continues. Someday one of them will reach final status. But as of now, I don't think any are at a level where I'd be willing to expend the resources to print them. Two are close, though. Maybe one more draft each. Of course, this process could easily lead to endless tinkering. Maybe it already has.
When I've finished the first draft I leave it for as long as I can, usually a couple of weeks. Then I print it, and read through to get a general idea about it. At most I make a little note in the margin but I do not start editing in this stage. When I've read it all I start fixing the big issues first, for example removing scenes or chapters, write additional ones, work on the characterization, the descriptions, milieus, etc. My first drafts are always very scarse, so I have to add a whole lot of description of all kinds of things that I leave out (not consciously) in the first draft phase. After that I read through again, several times, and keep revising after a couple of beta readers have given me some feedback. I go through my ms as many times as needed to be happy about it, checking language, clichés, dialogues, removing adverbs and stuff. proofreading is the last step. Sometimes I let someone read it again when I think I'm completely finished.
I agree that first drafts are in no way unavoidably bad. I personally have an editing process like a yoyo, I edit as I go, and then if a specific inference calls for more detail/a change of scene previously, I go back and change it, then edit that to completion before moving on with the writing. This has the result of giving me a very polished first draft, which I will then massively nit-pick and get others to do likewise, so I can make the final changes necessary for me to consider it 'finished' (as if any piece of work is ever truly finished.
I edit as I go, trying to make each sentence and paragraph as good as I can before I move on. Each day when I start a writing session, I read over the previous few days' work to reacquire the tone I'm using, and invariably I make more changes at that point. Then I move on with the new material. My first drafts read very well, but because I don't use an outline, they have a lot of wrong turns and dead ends. When I finish the first draft, I save it and copy it into a new document as a second draft, in which I remove all the wrong stuff and add new material to bridge over the gaps. I'm pretty wasteful of paper and toner. I print out the chapter I'm working on every day and go over it with red pen as part of the process. I usually find places I merely skimmed over that need more depth, so I flip the page over and write new paragraphs on the back, which I then insert next time I'm at the computer. Sometimes I use several different colors of pen - red to delete, green to suggest alternative sentences or paragraphs, black for new material on the backs of the pages, etc. My first drafts sometimes wind up looking like a child's art project. That's how I traditionally did it. I'm using Scrivener now, and it permits me to have many different drafts of each scene all together in the same project file. I can select which one I want in the final "compiled" version when I print it out. This is changing my approach a little, but I'm still experimenting with the software to find the best way for me to revise with it.
Finally finished my first ever, full rewrite of my first novel-length manuscript. Just wanted to celebrate. And say hi to all the good people here I've missed while working hard these past many months. I have a good feeling about this year. I can see myself querying an agent after another two revisions.
Thank you @GingerCoffee No @Aaron Smith , I wrote it on my Alienware laptop. I just printed it to loo like it it was done on a typewriter
Congratulation!!! It's hard work doing a full re-write (I've already had to do two on my own novel). Polishing a novel is really hard work and takes a lot of patience. Be sure to be getting alpha and beta readers! Trust me, it'll save you in the editing process to have a second set of eyes.
Not this time. During this process I found I do better if I make notes into a word file and then use those when rewriting to help. I have three files open now when I work. Notes, current draft, previous draft. The paper copy is for purposes of Awesome.
