Revising a first draft gives the writer a chance to re-think and re-vision the project.\u00a0\u00a0 Almost everything is up for grabs–grabs to keep, and grabs to toss in the garbage.\u00a0 If the book in question is part of a larger work, and if it is under contract to a particular publisher and editor, some things aren’t up for grabs (no, you can’t contract to send them a historically accurate mystery set in 1750 and instead decide that you’d rather dump the whole draft, saving out only the mischievous pet monkey, and hand them a dark and unsettling horror story set in Trump’s America instead.)\u00a0\u00a0 But practically speaking, every scene, every word your characters utter, every sentence can be changed if you see a need for it.\u00a0 That red brick house can be brown; that adjective “red” can become scarlet or a “scarlet” can become red.\u00a0 Ten pages of children at a party, which seemed hardly enough when you wrote it, can be cut back to two, with only the most plot-relevant comment from one mother to another that Janet looks sallow today (Janet’s being poisoned by her stepfather) because something else became more important during the latter half of the book.\u00a0 When you see the thing “whole” (unless you’re the most gifted outliner in the world) there will be things that weren’t in the outline but are now clearly important, and things according to outline that have changed in significance.\u00a0\u00a0 This is when the word “revision” means most, unlike “editing”–you have the chance to make a new vision of what that book should be, and then–informed by that new vision, that re-visioning–you can more easily see what parts don’t fit, what parts fit but fit badly and need pruning (more common) or more fertilizer (less common, at least in my experience.)<\/p>\n
Nothing that happens in this revision will be visible to future readers (unless you have alpha readers you trust with your first draft.)\u00a0 This is good; it frees you from having to worry about what “they” think.\u00a0\u00a0 If you run across a scene or a character that really needs to be out of that book, save it…I’ve never yet found them as useful as I hoped, but it’s perfectly OK to keep your own private “Chapter X”\u00a0 to enjoy because you just love how that scene goes.\u00a0\u00a0 I kept the “snow respite” that had to come out of Oath of Gold<\/em> for several years…but it wasn’t of use anywhere else, and the book was better without it.\u00a0 What you’re concerned about in this first revision of a new book is making the book that readers end up with the best possible book telling its story.\u00a0\u00a0 What you take out will not be noticed; what you leave in that shouldn’t be there will trip people up.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You don’t have to kill your darlings.\u00a0 Just get them offstage so they don’t interrupt the play.<\/p>\n But don’t junk that chapter or scene or character when you first wonder if it should go.\u00a0 Read the entire story, start to end, as uncritically as you can, as fast as you normally read a book.\u00a0\u00a0 Something that looks clumsy and “not fitting in” in Chapter Three may have attained plot-relevance by Chapter Twenty-eight.\u00a0 As you read, if something seems to slow, boring, too confusing, or doesn’t make sense, mark it to look at again.\u00a0 Maybe something’s a few pages (or chapters) out of sequence…put it back in where it really makes sense.\u00a0 Make sure effects come after causes (whether the causes are stated right there or not…causes can be discovered later, but they can be causes only if they precede the effect.)\u00a0\u00a0 Be sure it’s a cause that can<\/em> cause that effect (especially if dealing with physical cause\/effect…in areas of science or medicine where you’re not an expert.<\/p>\n (And don’t try to write a post if you’re also fixing Thanksgiving Dinner…the gap between putting the turkey in to bake and serving it is full of interruptions!!!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Revising a first draft gives the writer a chance to re-think and re-vision the project.\u00a0\u00a0 Almost everything is up for grabs–grabs to keep, and grabs to toss in the garbage.\u00a0 If the book in question is part of a larger work, and if it is under contract to a particular publisher and editor, some things Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":635,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}