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To Revise or Not To Revise
Sep. 5th, 2010 09:22 pmRevision is going to happen at some point or another, so the question isn't so much 'if' as 'when.'
For much of my writing life I was a revise-as-you-go sort of writer. Lots of published authors do this, so it is a reasonable method. When SJ Rozan came to talk at my MFA program in January, she told us that she writes new material every night, revises it in the morning, and then starts the cycle again the next night. I think of hers as the telephone cord method- looping around backward before going forward again.
I was never quite that organized. I would write several chapters, then go away from it for a while, sometimes weeks or months. This was also back when I would only write "when the muse struck me," so there were lots of days when I didn't write at all. When the muses appeared and the stars aligned, I would have to re-read everything to become reacquainted with my manuscript. As I read, I would start revising. But after I squandered the energy on all of those revisions, I didn't have much left for new material. I might get an extra page or so written, but never much more than that.
Even after my first few years of NaNoWriMo I still did the same thing. It took me until 2004, the year I won my first NaNo, to realize that the "write it all down then revise the crap out later" approach worked for me. I could finish stories this way. So from then on I have endeavored to take this approach to writing, both in the "write every day" work ethic and the "revise later" approach to editing.
A friend commented on my personal blog that as a short story writer she finds that she works better when she doesn't force herself to write every day. On the days she forces herself to write she just writes crap that she ends up deleting. She made the comparison to training for runners. A sprinter isn't going to need the endurance training that a cross-country runner needs. So short stories can come out in bursts whereas novels need that daily persistence.
But I should mention that, as long as you are consistently producing and happy with your writing, it doesn't matter if you write every day or just on the first and third Tuesdays of the month. It doesn't matter if you revise daily or at the end of each chapter or after you finish the whole book (or short story). Just keep on writing, keep on creating, and you'll get there eventually.
For much of my writing life I was a revise-as-you-go sort of writer. Lots of published authors do this, so it is a reasonable method. When SJ Rozan came to talk at my MFA program in January, she told us that she writes new material every night, revises it in the morning, and then starts the cycle again the next night. I think of hers as the telephone cord method- looping around backward before going forward again.
I was never quite that organized. I would write several chapters, then go away from it for a while, sometimes weeks or months. This was also back when I would only write "when the muse struck me," so there were lots of days when I didn't write at all. When the muses appeared and the stars aligned, I would have to re-read everything to become reacquainted with my manuscript. As I read, I would start revising. But after I squandered the energy on all of those revisions, I didn't have much left for new material. I might get an extra page or so written, but never much more than that.
Even after my first few years of NaNoWriMo I still did the same thing. It took me until 2004, the year I won my first NaNo, to realize that the "write it all down then revise the crap out later" approach worked for me. I could finish stories this way. So from then on I have endeavored to take this approach to writing, both in the "write every day" work ethic and the "revise later" approach to editing.
A friend commented on my personal blog that as a short story writer she finds that she works better when she doesn't force herself to write every day. On the days she forces herself to write she just writes crap that she ends up deleting. She made the comparison to training for runners. A sprinter isn't going to need the endurance training that a cross-country runner needs. So short stories can come out in bursts whereas novels need that daily persistence.
But I should mention that, as long as you are consistently producing and happy with your writing, it doesn't matter if you write every day or just on the first and third Tuesdays of the month. It doesn't matter if you revise daily or at the end of each chapter or after you finish the whole book (or short story). Just keep on writing, keep on creating, and you'll get there eventually.
