I 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 through revision process. The comments to that post inspired me to think a bit about my process of writing and revising, and analyze a bit why I write the way I do.
When I write I tend not to revise as I go. There are several reasons for that, one being that I can sit down and turn out 1-3000 words pretty easily once I get going, and revising takes time away when I am trying to get it down, particularly if I am writing a novel. It is very easy to get bogged down in revising, and use it as an excuse not to write, or to get distracted. With shorter works I can sit down and bang them all out pretty fast. The other reason is generally I write, and then I let it sit for a bit before I go back and start revising, even if it just a few days. That gives it time to settle and the whole piece feels a lot more jelled when I go back to it.
I break my rule a bit when writing novels, because I don’t plan any of my writing out beforehand. I generally know a scene or two ahead of where I am currently writing, and so if the plot changes from something I wrote before I’ll go back and tweak where it varies from the current direction, again not necessarily a lot of editing, but enough that when I go back to revise I know what I am doing.
In revising short stories I do everything as I go along - language, spelling, plot holes, character issues, etc. In revising my novel I do the same thing, from beginning to end, but where as short stories generally need one really hard edit and then a few refining edits, I know I am going to need a second hard edit for this book. As the novel is all drafted down I know how it ends and how the plot is going to go, and as I revise for the first time there is a lot of scenes where I either need to or choose to do a lot of rewriting, sometimes a few pages worth. there are also scenes, more towards the end, that I rushed through and summarized when I got tired, and those I expand. But I also pay attention to grammar, spelling, characterization, language, all that, so the second hard edit isn’t to focus on those issues, it is to go over the more jelled together novel as if I am revising it for the first time, to turn it fully into something I can do polishing edits on.
