Turning "It's Horrible" Into "It's Fantastic!"

Good morning, everyone! Audra here. We're looking at racking up lots of words during Speedbo - no thinking, just writing! I couldn't resist inviting Cathy Yardley back to Seekerville this month to give us some tips on what to do with our massive amount of words after Speedbo.  



Generally, writers I work with either love revising, hate revising, or have a love-hate relationship with it -- meaning they feel both!

However you feel about revisions, they're a necessary part of being a professional writer. No one writes a perfect draft on the first go.

But how do you approach revisions?

In the industry, there's a three pass system, and it's survived all these years for a reason: it's very effective.

First pass.

The first pass is story level. It's a prototype: seeing if all the moving parts of your draft actually work. Are your characters consistent? Does your plot work as you envisioned? Does the plot actually work with the characters you've created -- that is, are they behaving logically, or are you forcing them to take actions for the sake of where you want the story to go? Does each scene hook the reader, drawing her naturally into the next one?

In the first pass, you do not look at word craft, or even the niceties of scene craft. Why? Because if the scene doesn't work, then you're going to need to either entirely revamp it, or remove it. There's no point in polishing the prose if you're going to cut it. It's a waste of time and effort, and if you're like most writers I know, you don't have a surplus of either.

Second pass.

In the second pass, you know that the story works. Now, you tighten your focus, working at scene level. You should have already confirmed that each scene is there for good reason, forwarding your character’s developmental arc and furthering the plot. From there, you’re going to sharpen, strengthen and layer each individual scene, so it not only serves its purpose, it excels at it.  Is each scene anchored? Does the setting contribute to the mood and emotion? Are the descriptions, well, descriptive? Are character voices – both internal exposition and dialogue – unique and consistent? Does the scene use the best point of view choice? How can you add layers of depth and dimension, heightening the emotion and the conflict, increasing the tension?

Third pass.

In the third pass, you'll be doing your fine polish. This pass is sentence level: you're looking at word choice, grammar, etc.  This is where you catch your grammar tics and typos. Personally, I have an unhealthy attachment to both ellipses and em dashes. In my third pass, I always weed out as many as I can!  You may also notice a repetition of words on a page: for example, “I looked at the sky. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day. The sky looked like a robin’s egg, a pale, perfect blue.”  Again, nothing technically wrong, but the repetition dulls the writing.  

Do you have to work in this order?

I like to use the analogy of building a house. Your first pass is structural: you're constructing the framework and making sure basics like plumbing and wiring are effective, installing windows and doors. Your second pass is putting up things like drywall, fixtures, flooring. Your third pass is decorative: painting, decorating, cleaning up so it's ready to move in.

Most people who are overwhelmed by revisions tend to try doing everything at once. They're trying to decorate a room, only to then tear open a wall to fix the plumbing they hadn't realized was disconnected! It leads to a lot of frustration and duplication of effort.

Following the pass system as it stands is really the most effective way to go about it.  The trick is to be able to stay in the right frame of mind. It’s very common to wince your way through the first pass, thinking, “This writing is terrible! The dialogue’s flat, and it has no setting! I must fix this immediately!”

Try to resist the urge. If you spend an hour polishing a scene, only to discover that the whole scene needs to be cut, you’ll never get that hour back. While it could be worthwhile, simply to practice your craft, think about how much time you have, and remember you’re also developing your writing process for a long term writing career. The more efficiently and effectively you write, the more books you’ll be able to produce!

If you're doing Speedbo:

Many of you are participating in Speedbo this month. Personally, I'm a big fan of writing a "lightning draft" as a first pass. The speed allows you to silence your inner editor (or at least quiet her down a bit!) and move forward.

Sometimes, my coaching clients moan "but it's horrible!" That's fine. In fact, it's supposed to be horrible! Your rough draft is raw material. Revision is the mining process that separates the dross from the gold, and gives you something to polish.

The temptation to go back and "fix" each scene a bit as you go can be overpowering. Also, you'll probably have the sinking feeling that it's all terrible at some point. (For me, this usually hits around chapter seven. Keep in mind, I've published eighteen novels, and I still feel this way!)  Try to resist the urge. It’s just a common loss of perspective. Writing is an act of faith. You need to be able to move ahead despite your anxieties to the contrary. If you have difficulty with this, getting a cheerleader to help remind you to keep moving will help. Use every trick in the book if you need to. But keep moving!

Finally, always keep track of what works for you… and what doesn’t.

It’s important to recognize your own writing process.  If you’re the type of writer who feels she can’t move forward until the previous scene is polished, that’s fine. However, any sort of rush-draft scenario – Speedbo, Nano, Book in a Month, etc. – is probably not going to work well with your particular writing style.  If you’re not sure what your writing style is, I recommend trying something like Speedbo at least once, to try it out.

That said, don’t feel like a failure if you wind up abandoning it because you can’t keep up due to constant revising.  It’s more important for you to figure out what works for you than to force yourself to fit someone else’s method, even if it does seem more efficient.

What’s your writing process?  Do you like fast drafting, or are you polish-as-you-go?  How do you approach revisions?

Rock Your Revisions

Audra again. March will end before you know it and when that happens, we'll all be looking at massaging our work and making sense of the whole bunch of words we've compiled. To help remind us, Cathy is giving away a copy of her ebook, Rock Your Revisions. Seekerville is also giving away two more copies of Rock Your Revisions. Good things come in threes, don't they?

Also, check out the incredible specials she's running in March. Cathy is discounting her one hour plot calls and her editing services. You can reserve the editing rate to use by the end of 2015. Make sure you check out all of Cathy's writing, revising, promoting tools on her website.  

Cathy Yardley is the author of seventeen novels, published with Harlequin, St. Martin’s, Entangled, and Avon. She is also a teacher, editor, and writing coach at her website, RockYourWriting.com. Sign up for her free e-course Jump-start Your Writing Career, and check out her e-books on plotting, revising, and writing every day!