All my editing and revisional concerns are done.* Now, I write! Yay, writing! How I missed thee!**
I’m not one of those writers who has learned to enjoy revision. For me, brainstorming is fun, writing is mostly fun, and editing hovers in the seventh level of hell. Good for me and necessary and blah blah blah, but certainly my least favorite part of the job.
I was speaking to a friend who would die before planning her books out beforehand, and her theory is that the reason I do so much brainstorming and plotting and whatnot is that I’m resistant to the idea of changing it after it’s been written down. Well, yeah. Measure twice, cut once and all that. But then I know others who love to plan and just as gleefully sit down with their red pen to edit.
One of my problems is that I never have a good head for what happens once I change things. My memory of events are always as I originally wrote them. There’s a scene cut from the first book and I wrote the vast majority of the second book as if it had happened. More often than not, changing one line of dialogue makes me think that I need to rewrite the entire scene, since, in my head, each word builds on the next, and if a character says apple instead of orange, then fifty pages down the way, he can’t reference oranges, and he can’t think about oranges for those 50 pages in between. And even if he isn’t thinking about oranges on the page, he’s doing it in his head and mine, and in our heads, it is imparting an orange tint onto everything else he says. And so things seem out of place to me, as if I tried to zest an orange, only to wind up with a pile of apple peels.
I remember hearing an author speak a few years back about how, after a draft of her book was finished, she changed the identity of the villain. On the page, very little changed. But in her head, it was a total overhaul. Now that I understand.
Needless to say, I’m so happy to be back in the realm of pure writing!
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* For another few weeks, until I get my copyedits back.
** Since I’ve been spending altogether too much time in waiting rooms recently, I’ve managed to take a chunk out of my TBR pile. Finally read Flowers from the Storm, and it was as good as Gina led me to believe it was. Thanks, Gina!
November 27th, 2007 at 7:26 am
And that is how a character turns out to be gay despite never being written in the published text.
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November 27th, 2007 at 9:35 am
I’m so glad you liked FFTS!
BTW–I feel exactly the same way about changing an orange to an apple. I just wish I could remember what I’ve written from one day to the next.
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Yay for writing!!
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Yay for writing! Glad you’re back in the groove.
Re: planning books out beforehand – I was thinking this morning that until recently most major writers probably didn’t do that, and would have looked on a plotting board as a form of alien space life. Take Dickens, for example: he wrote most of his major novels episodically for weekly or monthly printing deadlines. Not for him the multi-colored PostIts preordaining Little Nell’s death.
Personally, I seem to be more like your friend, letting the writing unfold as it will. Structural matters such as POV(s) aren’t pre-planned; they just happen as the writing evolves.
To paraphrase Lord Chesterfield’s remark to Edward Gibbon, “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Clark?”
Got that right, your lordship.
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:21 am
I enjoy revisions with an editor. Not so much by myself. Not sure why.
Teri
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Exactly, Teri! Revising with an editor is great, but by myself is tough.
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:50 am
I always find revising so hard because there’s just so much of it! I mean, it’s 250 printed pages to deal with! And I totally agree with Diana about changing an apple to an orange and how that can just echo through the rest of the book.
But I think my biggest fear is accidentally changing *that thing* that made the book work, but that I didn’t know made the book work.
Yay revisions being done, Diana!!
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November 27th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I don’t think that’s the case, Bill. I mean, obviously, not Post-Its, because that’s a recent invention, but I do believe there was much planning done. The formal structure of so many types of stories (epic poems, etc.) would have required it.
And if he was making it up as he went along, perhaps the letters pleading with him not to kill Nell might have been heeded.
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November 27th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I have the same problem with remembering what I’ve changed in later versions. But you’ve said it much better than I ever manage to.
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November 27th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Since I’ve been spending altogether too much time in waiting rooms recently, Did I miss something?
I totally understand what you’re saying. I needed to change the date of the heroine’s best friend arriving…yeah, well, needless to say the original date has stuck in my head and I had to rewrite the scene and several others. The change from several days to one week changed so very much.
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November 27th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Another important impact of Dickens’s episodic writing style was his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions.
A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Little Nell and her Grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit. As Dickens wrote and published the weekly instalments, his friend John Forster pointed out: “You know you’re going to have to kill her, don’t you.” Why this end was necessary can be explained by a brief analysis of the difference between the structure of a comedy versus a tragedy. In a comedy, the action covers a sequence “You think they’re going to lose, you think they’re going to lose, they win.” In tragedy, it’s: “You think they’re going to win, you think they’re going to win, they lose”. The dramatic conclusion of the story is implicit throughout the novel. So, as Dickens wrote the novel in the form of a tragedy, the sad outcome of the novel was a foregone conclusion. If he had not caused his heroine to lose, he would not have completed his dramatic structure. Dickens admitted that his friend Forster was right and, in the end, Little Nell died.
I culled the above from Wikipedia (I know, I know, it’s not the Encyclopaedia Britannica), and thought that whoever wrote the article, despite contradicting himself on the public opinion score, probably makes a good point: Dickens may have been unsure at the outset whether he was writing a comedy or a tragedy. When the balance tipped towards tragedy, Little Nell was doomed, despite readership opinion.
Which is why no one has ever been able to solve “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”, left unfinished at Dickens’s death. One school of thought is that Dickens himself didn’t know the outcome; he left no notes or hints behind. When I taught a college course on the detective story, neither I nor the class could find any definitive hints in the text as to whodunnit. The best any of us could do was to spin out a plausible theory, which were many and varied. Perhaps Dickens himself was waiting to see which of the characters would ultimately turn out to be the villain?
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November 27th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
I’m with you on the hating, D. Writing is fun, but revisions are STUPID!!! I HATE THEM!! I’M DOING THEM RIGHT NOW!!!
Sorry. I meant I’m happy for you that you’re done.
Brat.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 8:23 am
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