Comments on: Revising – not QUITE as hard as giving birth.

By: The home of fiction author Val Gryphin… » Blog Archive » Revising, the process

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:19:50 +0000

[...] wrote about the stress of revising my novel last week, and how with a long work sometimes I find it a challenge to make it all of the way [...]

By: Rosie

Rosie — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:04:07 +0000

I revise as I go along. I know there is a large school of thought that says this is a flawed way to approach it, but I find that I cut a quarter of my length when I do hard edits. This way, I don’t end up short on whatever word count I sort of decided I was shooting for. Also, the idea of approaching a really big stack of pages in the harrowing stage sort of scares me.

But…I do a gang of pre-plotting so most of what I’m doing is really boring language, grammar and punctuation passes. Once it is stripped down and settled I can more easily figure out things that aren’t quite right in the story.

But, yeah–it’s the hardest part. That–and waiting for it to settle. I really love my babies right after they pop out, but it takes a while to really see them in all their glorious ugliness.

By: Tara

Tara — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:13:00 +0000

Wow, that’s a lot of lot of work.

When I write longish things, I revise the last few pages every time I come back to it to write more.

By: Drew

Drew — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:25:11 +0000

Congrats on nearing the end of your first pass…that has to be a huge undertaking. Since I haven’t revised anything longer than a longish short story, did you set up any sort of structure towards your revision? Like did you fix plot holes first, and then character stuff? Or did you just go through linearly? Or something else?