hell’s beekeepers

Revision for me is a fairly relaxed business—unless my editor has told me WE NEED THIS ON TUESDAY, which thank sweet Thoth on his e-bike is very rare.

It also helps that I like revising. (When I was a kid, I liked liver, too. And spinach. Just call me Miss Outlier and let's move on.)

First of all: second draft/first revision draft is nowhere near as tense for me as first draft. Because, thank God, at least there's a book.

First draft is where I sweat blood and otherwise suffer. While I can see the story just fine in my head, it's not really real for me until the first draft, whole in narrative and action, is complete on paper/in the machine. And till it's achieved at least that level of reality, I can't relax.

But secondly: by the time I hit my second/revision draft, I can be confident that any serious problems in the novel have already been solved—because I'm an outliner. In the outline stage, potential thematic or structural troubles will routinely have revealed themselves way long ago: before drafting even got started, as I first wired the story's bones together. By the time first draft's done, I can tell at a glance whether the skeleton can successfully stand up by itself. And gods is that a relief! It's like shrieking "It's aliiiiiive!" as the lightning strikes around you.*

However, if my editor's found something structurally or thematically troublesome that I've completely missed until this point, that's another story. My first business is to fix whatever their notes involve, let my editor see what I've done about those problems, and get agreement that whatever intervention I've enacted has fixed those now.

After that, everything happens in bed.

(...casually noting that for a line to use somewhere else...) :)

But seriously: I do my best revision and editing before getting up in the morning.

Some of this is because, for me, the mind's nice and quiet and (theoretically) at least moderately well rested, right after sleep. I might have the briefest glance at my email first to make sure nothing urgent needs attention... but after that, I refuse to let myself go any further down that hole. That early-morning calm is a mental state I'm glad to exploit, and one I jealously guard. On days when I'm forced to do without the easy-going lie-in**, I use a different approach: when there's a pause, sit down and do nothing—no reading, no video, no music, no phone, nothing—for half an hour: then start editing. Routinely, the quiet I need will have fallen.

This in-bed-editing approach also works for me because (since I'm working in Scrivener) it's absolutely no big deal to finish a day's editing on a file by exporting a version of the file containing the day's edits to ebook format, and into my Dropbox. From there, in the morning, without ever getting out from under the covers, I can pull that .epub file into my tablet and read it as an ebook, making corrections and notes there.

This is what it looks like (on a page without too many corrections) if the app you're using is "Books" in an iPad. The second image is what you get when you touch on the marginal yellow square of the note to examine it.

Then, when I'm finished looking over the previous day's/evening's writing and adding notes to it, I go downstairs, get some caffeine in me, and make the changes in the main Scrivener file. (If I was running the project in question on the iPad version of Scrivener, I'd just make the change right there. But who knows when I'd actually get up, then? Better to do it this way.) :)

In the normal flow of things I'll attempt to deal with a chapter or two a day in this mode. (Always bearing in mind that my chapters in early drafts typically run long—often 10K or so—and I'm likely enough to rebreak them later.) This first level of revision is the easy one: catching typos and bad or clumsy phrasings, reworking character interactions that need smoothing out; adding better descriptive passages (with particular emphasis on staying in the visual, audio and tactile senses), etc., etc.

So again: no way I'd ever bother worrying about word counts, with these. What seems to count for more is giving yourself time to recognize, gradually, at a reader's pace, what's working in the prose and what isn't. Rush—or try to force the pace to a given number of words per day—and you might miss things. To me, at the tracking level, it seems sufficient to note which chapters have been dealt with, and which are still hanging fire. (I can change the chapters' color labels in Scrivener to make this status visible at a glance, if I need to.)

When everything's dealt with on this pass—which if I'm lucky will take no more than a couple/few weeks—I try to take a couple weeks off before dealing with the MS again. Sometimes that's possible: sometimes not. The longer, the better. Distance lends clarity.

In any case, next (for me) comes another pass, tougher to describe. Casually, I refer to it as the "Missed Opportunities/Complications" pass. This is a thing that one of the very best writers I know, John M. Ford, used to do. One of his editors (I think it was) came across him working on an MS one time, and asked him what he was doing. "Complications," Mike muttered. "Removing them?" said his editor. Mike shook his head. "Adding them," he said.

In this pass you look for in-novel connections you've previously missed making. Some dramatic moments have their impact significantly increased if you've found a way to connect them, even casually, with previous events or earlier dialogue. (The cheap and easy mnemonic for this kind of thing: "Say a thing twice, and it echoes. Say it three times, and it resonates.")

Equally, events (and people) may need more complex backstory than you've given them in your first draft; so this is where you take care of that. And of course there are character and emotional interactions that can probably use attention; fewer words, more depth, more complexity. What things do these people, in this situation, need to say to one another that they haven't? What drama got passed up on because you were just too damn tired in the last draft? —Because you too, poor baby, are human; and that state can, entirely logically, make you want not to deal with any more damn drama just now. Even though drama is the lifeblood of your narrative, usually, and decreasing it really doesn't help. You are the conduit of power into your narrative, and your varying ability to conduct is always an issue.

This pass, ideally, might take no more than another few weeks or a month. And again, I'm not sure any attempt at wordcount tracking would do this work any good. Because, again... are they the right words? And to make the narrative more effective, you may wind up removing as many words as you added in previous passes.

Finally, with all things taken together, I usually reach a point where (by myself, anyway) I can't think of anything to do that'll make this book any better. That's where there then comes, for me—and again, impossible to assign a word count to it—a time when you know you're as Done As You Can Be. If you've been doing this long enough, you may even hear a strange kind of sigh in the back of your head, as the book gives up and lets go...

...into the next stage. Because, even when sold, no book's ever that easily done.

Anyway, that's when I throw the book the hell out of the house—because no matter how much I've loved it previously, by that time I'm seriously tired of it—and wait to see whether the editor feels it needs another draft. (Disclosure: this has never happened. There might be a few notes that need to be handled. But another full draft? Never yet.)

Anyway: hope this is of help to you.

But the heart of it all? Find your own way, and screw the bar graphs.

*That line, too, is an indicator of trouble to come. "It's?" Not "he's"? Tsk tsk.