Is Revision Sucking? Two Strategies to Make It Joyful Again
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Episode Transcript
Hey First Draft Club listeners, and hey if you’re watching on YouTube. This episode is going to be another one on revising.
I was having a conversation with a writer in The Book Incubator recently and she was telling me that she’d had a great time writing her book in the program but now that she was revising, all the joy was gone, she found herself dreading it, and as a result she was procrastinating.
It’s an issue that comes up for people often enough that I decided to make a podcast episode around it.
I’m going to talk about two common reasons why revision sucks more than it needs to, and what to do about it. Let’s go.
First, here’s the thing about revision: it’s absolutely terrible if you don’t have clarity around what needs to change. If you don’t have clarity around what needs to change, you feel lost because you are lost. So stop gaslighting yourself—you are lost. Your compass is malfunctioning, you’re off the trail, you can’t tell which direction is home, and so you need to do what people do when they’re lost: stay put. The last thing you want to do when you’re lost is keep moving in a random direction, hoping it’s the correct one.
This is the kind of thing that leads people to, as Curtis Sittenfeld has put it, change things around in an 80% good book so that it’s different but still 80% good.
If you’re investing your time and energy, you want to be making the book better. Right?
The only way to get clarity once it’s gone is to get distance from your draft.
This is why I insist that writers I work with set the draft aside after writing it. Because distance tends to the sole means of acquiring vital clarity around what needs to change.
Once you have clarity, however, revision becomes much, much easier, and honestly, I think fun! I started loving revision once I figured out the clarity thing.
But lack of clarity isn’t the only thing that can go wrong with revision, and this brings me back to the story I started telling at the top.
My client had lost the joy in revision, and when I asked her if she had clarity, she actually did. That wasn’t the problem.
She’d read through her first draft—what I call “the gut read”—and identified what needed to change.
But still, revision had started to feel like a giant burden. So I asked her to read me her revision notes. I wanted to know what was on her list of things to change.
As soon as she started reading through them, I understood what the problem was. I’m going to share a paraphrase of them here, and see if you can figure it out:
Some of the side characters are more interesting than I realized and I want to develop them further
The antagonist feels like a straw man
There’s too much interiority and not enough action
It takes too long for the plot to get moving
Do you see it? I’ll read it one more time:
Some of the side characters are more interesting than I realized and I want to develop them further
The antagonist feels like a straw man
There’s too much interiority and not enough action
It takes too long for the plot to get moving
Here’s what I told her I thought the problem was: of her 4 major revision tasks, 3 of them were negative. They were things that weren’t working that she was tasking herself to fix. Only one of them, the first one, was positive, in the sense that was something to DO, not something NOT to do: to develop characters further.
I have a six-year-old kid, and a few years ago, I read something in a parenting book that blew my mind.
It said that when it comes to disciplining children, it’s much more effective to tell the WHAT to do than to tell the NOT to do something, because our brains don’t know how to execute on a command NOT to do something—it’s not natural for us.
For example, “don’t hold your fork like that” is like saying “don’t think about a pink elephant.” It’s HARD! How am I supposed to hold my fork then? Just drop it I guess?
Versus, “hold your fork like this.”
Instead of “don’t chew with your mouth open,” you said, “chew with your mouth closed.”
Instead of “stop running,” you say, “walk.”
Instead of “don’t yell,” you say, “lower your voice.”
Do you see how much easier it is to get your head around a POSITIVE command than a negative one?
The same holds true for the revision notes we give ourselves. You tell yourself that the beginning isn’t working, and of course your brain shuts down. How difficult does that sound to manage?
And yet revision notes are often of the negative variety—that’s how they come out. That’s fine. We don’t need to fix that.
But we then need to take them a step further.
In my client’s case, I suggested she start with the positive note—to develop her side characters—and do it outside of the draft, do some free writing the same way she wrote her first draft. See what comes up and see if it leads to anything that could help her turn the other tasks on her revision list, the negative ones, into positive ideas.
To be clear, I don’t mean “positive” as in “cheerful.” Your book can be dark. I mean actionable. I mean, “hold the fork like this” versus “don’t hold the fork like that.”
Sometimes this is actually not that hard to do.
Instead of saying, “make the antagonist not a straw man,” you could say what? You could say, “give the antagonist a more three-dimensional set of fears and motivations.” Already I feel like it sounds like an undertaking I’m not dreading as much…it feels more manageable, fun even.
In sum, revision doesn’t have to be a total downer. I have come to love revision—it’s my favorite part of writing a book. We just have to understand how it’s different from the process of writing the first draft and find ways to bring the joy back into the process.
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