Is it a house of cards or a lump of clay?
I'm about to start revising a new book based on feedback from my editor. I've revised many (many many!) books before but it's different when there's a publication date and you have actual deadlines to get certain things to certain people.
Which makes revising this book much more nerve-wracking: someone - perhaps multiple someones - is waiting for it in the very near future.
Before I allow myself to slip into panic mode, I thought back to previous revisions and how I'd approached them. I also reminded myself that a new draft, especially when a seasoned editor has provided feedback on it, is pretty much always better than the first draft.
The very first novel I wrote, back in 2001 when I was completely and utterly clueless, was 800 pages long. They were double spaced pages but there were 800 of them. It was just about 100K words, which is a-okay when you're well-known or are writing a fantasy novel, but for an unknown, it was wayyyy too long.
The first agent I approached told me to cut it in half before he would even look at it. My reaction was shock and indignance! How dare he ask me to cut it in half. Cut certain parts? Certain characters? Okay, I could understand that but to randomly ask me to chop my labor of love in two? What is this, Sophie's Choice?
Ultimately I did just that and it worked out splendidly, eventually, but at the time I thought, "This is a house of cards with everything perfectly placed just so." I believed that if I removed a card here and there, the whole thing would collapse.
In reality, very few books are like that. Unless you're writing a complex mystery or something truly unusual like the film, "Memento," your first draft is probably very, very muddy. You may think that card on top is a crisp, sharp-edged Ace of Hearts but it's more like a Joker that you found sticking to the bottom of your shoe. You need to clean it up, give it a buff and shine, and maybe find it a new home on a different level of your house.
Now that I've been through a number of these things, I think of my first draft as a lump of clay that only looks like a house. I might think my story, my characters and their motivations are clear to the reader, but in all likelihood, they are not. They may be there but hidden within a scene; they may be obviously in the scene but the scene is in the wrong place; they may not even be on the page at all.
Time to sculpt!
Which makes revising this book much more nerve-wracking: someone - perhaps multiple someones - is waiting for it in the very near future.
Before I allow myself to slip into panic mode, I thought back to previous revisions and how I'd approached them. I also reminded myself that a new draft, especially when a seasoned editor has provided feedback on it, is pretty much always better than the first draft.
The very first novel I wrote, back in 2001 when I was completely and utterly clueless, was 800 pages long. They were double spaced pages but there were 800 of them. It was just about 100K words, which is a-okay when you're well-known or are writing a fantasy novel, but for an unknown, it was wayyyy too long.
The first agent I approached told me to cut it in half before he would even look at it. My reaction was shock and indignance! How dare he ask me to cut it in half. Cut certain parts? Certain characters? Okay, I could understand that but to randomly ask me to chop my labor of love in two? What is this, Sophie's Choice?
Ultimately I did just that and it worked out splendidly, eventually, but at the time I thought, "This is a house of cards with everything perfectly placed just so." I believed that if I removed a card here and there, the whole thing would collapse.
In reality, very few books are like that. Unless you're writing a complex mystery or something truly unusual like the film, "Memento," your first draft is probably very, very muddy. You may think that card on top is a crisp, sharp-edged Ace of Hearts but it's more like a Joker that you found sticking to the bottom of your shoe. You need to clean it up, give it a buff and shine, and maybe find it a new home on a different level of your house.
Now that I've been through a number of these things, I think of my first draft as a lump of clay that only looks like a house. I might think my story, my characters and their motivations are clear to the reader, but in all likelihood, they are not. They may be there but hidden within a scene; they may be obviously in the scene but the scene is in the wrong place; they may not even be on the page at all.
Time to sculpt!
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