Thought I'd pass this on...
Know why most people who write novels never revise them all the
way
to the end?
It's because they start out by thinking small.
Take a minute to look over Bob The Writer's shoulder as he
begins
to revise the NaNoWriMo novel he just finished.
Bob starts with sentence one. He reads it, gets out a pencil,
and
decides that "viridian" is classier in the sentence than the
word
"green." He adds one comma in sentence two, and scribbles
through
the dialogue that makes up sentence five, writing in something
that
seems a little smoother.
He works his way through the first ten pages, vaguely
dissatisfied
with the book even though he's making these changes. He's
fixing
it, isn't he?
But the deeper he gets into the book, the more he realizes that
it
has problems that grammar and stronger verbs aren't even
beginning
to touch.
Bob doesn't know it, but his revision is doomed. And the
reason
why is simple. He's thinking small. He's looking at his story
as
sentences that need to be fixed, not as a STORY that needs to
be
fixed.
He has not stopped to figure out three critical things:
*What he imagined the book would be before he wrote it,
*What it became when he finished it, and...
*What he wants it to be once he's revised it.
There are dozens of areas you need to consider when revising
your
novel, and all of them matter. But before you start looking
into
how you used characters, or conflict, or structure, or
worldbuilding, or dialogue, or plot, or any of the others, you
must
look at your story not as a collection of tiny sentences,
each
which needs to be corrected by an English teacher with a
thesaurus,
but as three BIG stories:
The one you imagined.
The one you got.
And the want you want to have when you're done.
Here's a little secret.
Grammar, spelling, and word choices are the LAST things you
revise.
Until you know what your story was supposed to be, what it is
now,
and what you're working to make it become, cleaning up your
typos
and using better nouns and verbs CAN'T fix it.
Write (and revise) with joy,
Holly
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