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The Writer's Workshop

The Writer's Workshop

The Writer's Workshop is a positive community to promote each other's work and learn the craft of writing and publishing

5149 members
Posted bySwankmotronin/writers-May 27, 2016 at 11:53 AMΔ

When to Start Revising...

When to Start Revising...

I'm in the process of revising my epic fantasy novel that I wrote late last year and though I'd tackle a topic that comes up often when I'm revising. I get asked pretty frequently, "When should I start revising my manuscript?"

swankmotron
One comment
  • yetanotherusernameMay 27, 2016 at 12:29 PM

    I sort of agree with this on principle, but I think it misses a massive opportunity. Absolutely you should write a book between revisions. Ideally two. Separate yourself as much as you can from the writing so that you only see what's on the page and not what you meant to say on the page.

    But that being said, there's a draft 1.5 that you're missing. I'm not a newbie. I've been writing for 3/4 of my life and I started publishing reliably ten years ago. I write a stupid amount of work in a year and I always have stories in the hopper, a work in progress and a work in revision.

    So I've got a lot of words under my belt. Millions in the last four years alone. When I start a book, no matter how much foreknowledge I have going into the story, I always realize at the halfway point that the book I thought I was writing was so much more than I planned on it being. No matter how much I think I know my characters, I don't really understand them until I've stomped around in their boots.

    So when I finish something, I whip around and rewrite the beginning with all the knowledge of the world and the characters and the problem because I'd just finished writing the end. In the ideal world, this would just mean rewriting until I got to the bit in the first draft where the story started firing on all cylinders, but realistically the characters as I know them in the second half often make completely different choices in character than the ones from the first draft, so there's never a spot that can just zip the first half with the second. So it usually means a complete rewrite. But that's still not draft 2. That's draft 1.5.

    Then comes the waiting and the writing something new and then the revision. I've said it a thousand times, but word processors are the bane of new writers everywhere. Up until computers were common, a second draft was a rewrite of the story. Every sentence had the author's thumbprint on it. Now people can be confused into thinking their final draft = their first draft + polish.

    Great books aren't written, they're rewritten is something I've known for most of my writing career, but realizing that it actually applied to me didn't happen until ten years ago. The slushpile has books in there that are the author's best work. Yours should be in that much smaller pool.

The Writer's Workshop

The Writer's Workshop

The Writer's Workshop is a positive community to promote each other's work and learn the craft of writing and publishing

5149 members
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