Revision Day Three: Mulling

My somewhat-less-rough draft! I'm so irrationally proud of its size that I had to post two pictures. Shh.

When last I left you, I was compiling my giant revision list of doom and preparing to run headlong into my draft, changing thing after thing after thing until there was nothing left. What really ended up happening is that I changed all the big things-- I wrote the new scenes I needed and edited the ones that needed heavy editing, and then what I was left with was a checklist that looked something like this:

1. Edit voice throughout.
2. Make sure group conversations aren't confusing throughout.
3. Etc. etc. etc. throughout.

Basically, I was left with a list of global edits that need to be applied to the entire draft, not just certain sections. So, rather than go through the draft once for all those global edits and then again for my basic line edits, I decided to do it all at the same time. And so: the mulling!

(Mulling: verb, meaning "to consider carefully.")

Without exception, every rough draft can benefit from a slow read-through, which is what I mean when I say "mulling." I want to emphasize the word slow because I tend to read my own drafts very quickly and in very short time frames, which means that I only read faster as I go because I just want to get it done. If you are like me, you could benefit from some mulling too, I think.

Some tips for the slow read-through:

1. Force yourself to read slowly. Set a goal like "I am only going to read one chapter an hour, and I'm only going to work for X amount of hours a day." Some of my chapters are only four or five pages long, so my limit will probably be something like three chapters an hour.

2. If you start to find yourself rushing, or annoyed with the whole process, STOP for the day. Rushing defeats the purpose of the slow read-through. You want to be careful, thoughtful, and thorough. If you can't do that on a certain day, put the draft aside and do something else. Read a book! Work on something else! Give your brain a break and come back to it the next day.

3. Keep a notebook nearby. Every time I do a read-through, certain parts of the draft remind me of later parts that need editing. At that point I am tempted to flip forward and edit those later parts first, which makes me lose my read-through momentum. Instead, I make myself write those reminders down and edit only when I reach that part of the story in my read-through, and that helps.

4. Print it out. You can send your manuscript to your local printer, pay to print at your school library (if they charge for that), or absorb the cost and print at home-- but whatever way you do it, printing the draft out can be a good way to make yourself read slowly if you tend to rush through words when they're on a screen, like I do. Also, it's fun to hold a fat stack of paper in your hand and say to people "I WROTE THIS!" (Not that I do that. *cough*)

5. Read tricky parts out loud. It will help. (I actually recommend reading the whole thing out loud, but sometimes that's just not practical.) You will notice awkward phrasing or inconsistencies better, and it's a lot easier to edit for voice if you're saying the words.

6. Decide on a good "input" plan. The point of printing the draft out, for me, is so that I can take notes directly on it-- but that means eventually, I'll have to input the changes in the actual word document. This can be tedious and annoying. My plan for this Mulling is to leave time each day to make the changes, rather than trying to do it all at once. But maybe you want to make a long day of making the changes-- that's great! Just make sure you know what works best for you.

Now I am going to stock up on chai tea and rice crackers and red pens and knock this baby out next to my Christmas tree.

Happy Mulling, everyone!

Revision Day Two: The Giant List of Doom

In the interest of providing insight into my revising process (which is always the same), and possibly ideas for others trying to revise, I am blogging about revising as I go. This is a continuation of yesterday's Revision Day One: The Read-Through.

So I did my read-through, I noted all the problems I noticed as I went, and I made my giant list of solutions to the problems that came up as I read or that I identified later. At this point, I probably should be feeling overwhelmed, but since I've had a can of orange soda and half a bag of Baked Lays, I'm feeling okay, actually, if slightly ill, and ready to move on to the next step.

What do I do with my giant list of doom, you ask? First, I group my solutions into two categories: global issues and local issues.

Allow me to explain:

Global issues are problems for which solutions need to be applied to the entire draft, or to large sections of the draft, like "the dynamic between these two characters needs to be different in this way" or "the main character needs to think about this issue periodically throughout the story until this point."

Local issues are problems for which solutions apply to specific scenes or specific groups of scenes, like "I need to add this plot development right after page 154."

Local issues become global issues when you, say, add a scene and then have to edit the rest of the draft to reflect that scene, or when you delete a scene and have to remove all subsequent mentions of that scene.

After I've divided my list into those categories (and this will usually involve writing more global issues down, because usually when you change a local issue you create a global issue, if you know what I mean). I open my handy dandy Scrivener, but you can also use a notebook or another Word document, if you choose to use this method. (By the way, what you see in my screenshots is an early version of Insurgent, with all details removed. This is not my first rodeo.)

I divide the manuscript into "movements" or sections to make things easier, and for each section, I write a list of the global issues that I need to address in each section. Maybe I won't need to address them in every scene, but I do need to be aware of them for each section. (The reason I divide into sections in the first place is that a particular global issue may only apply to the beginning or the end of the manuscript, or something like that, so they won't be the same the whole way through.)

Then for each scene or chapter, I put a list of local edits on the right side, in the box labeled "document notes." (In Word or OpenOffice this can easily be replicated by putting a "comment" next to each chapter heading. That's how I did it before I got Scrivener.)

the arrow is pointing at the document notes box. You can type in there!

Then I usually go back to my list again and think about what the most difficult section of the draft is going to be, or what the most difficult issue I have to address is going to be, and I tackle that first. The reason I do that is that the fear or apprehension related to the most difficult stuff will usually haunt me through the rest of the draft, and it's much better for me to just get it over with. Rip off the band-aid!

I don't worry about editing out of order, either, though I will usually proceed through one section at a time so as not to get confused. Then, when I finish each scene in a section, I label it with a color to make myself feel good about it, and I delete the local issues I typed in the document notes box. (It's like checking off a box!) (Note: with Word you can just...delete the comment before each chapter you finish!)

When I finish with a section, I delete the extra document listing all the global issues for that section.

I try to set goals like "this week I will finish with section 1, which means I have to do one scene every day and two scenes on one day." This ensures that I stay focused and motivated.

I should note that I didn't always do it this way-- it depends on how many "global issues" you have. When I have written drafts that have very few global issues (like Divergent-- most of my edits for Divergent involved adding new scenes), I have just written a long list of scenes to write or fix, arranged them in order of decreasing difficulty, and went through the draft item by item. That is simpler and will work for some drafts-- it just depends on how you work best, and on what your manuscript requires.

And that's it for the Big Edits, folks. Next time I post about this I'll be talking about smaller scale edits, like on the sentence level, and with grammar and punctuation, and special read-throughs you might want to do (reading for specific problems, etc.).

Revision, Day One: The Read Through

After writing four complete manuscripts and several manuscript fragments, I can tell you with reasonable confidence that this is my drafting process: whatever works. Outline, no outline, partial outline, writing at home, writing away from home, writing in the morning, writing at night, having people read as I go, refusing to let people read as I go, I have done them all, and when I find The Thing That Works, I do it until it stops working and find something else.

Despite the wild variations in my drafting process, however, my revising process is always the same. I thought it might be interesting to share it with you in the next few weeks as I experience it with my initial Book 3 revisions (to be followed by several other rounds of revisions). I want to emphasize that I'm not advocating a particular system of doing things-- every writer is different and is allowed to be different. But, every writer is also welcome to try new things to see if they work, and it is in the interest of providing hopefully-interesting insights and also suggestions that I will write these posts. (Also, if you're participating in NaNoWriMo, and you're not sure how to revise once you're done, you can consult these posts later for ideas!)

Approaching revisions, especially the first round, can be pretty daunting. (Although perhaps not if you are DAUNTLESS, eh? Eh?) If your rough drafts are anything like mine, they are a "festival of crap," as I described it to a friend earlier. There are a few parts that are well-thought-out and put together, but far more parts that are poorly written or lacking in focus or just plain wrong for the story. There are also missing pieces-- scenes you didn't write but should, or characters you left out, or plot elements that require more development. There may be extraneous scenes, characters, or whole plot movements.

At this point the first thing I can usually coax myself into doing is a read-through. It may have been several months since I last read the first scenes I wrote, so it's a good idea to get a sense of what's actually there. Plus, while I read, I'll be able to jot down problems and possible solutions to those problems.

That there on the screen? It's a draft of Insurgent open in Scrivener. Just so you know.

I usually write a hasty list of issues right when I finish a draft, because I don't let myself edit as I go and I don't want to forget the problems I already know about. So for Book 3, I already have seven or eight large issues in my "problems" column. Some problems to watch for:

-Do all the characters, major and minor, have some kind of arc or clear, defined presence in the story? If they are supposed to be missing, is this something that is explained or wondered about by the main character? This is one of the problems I always have, because when I draft I focus very much on the major characters and forget that there is a large cast of minor characters waiting in the wings. In the rough draft of Insurgent, Christina disappeared for over 100 pages. Not good.

-Have you built to the ending effectively? Most of the time I discover the ending of a book when I'm right in the middle of it, so the first half of the book may be building toward a completely different ending.

-How is the pacing? Are there places where it is too fast or too slow?

-Are there any sections with "infodump"? (Meaning, sections in which information is unloaded on the reader all at once instead of revealed slowly and through plot movement.)

-Are there any extraneous characters, scenes, or plot elements? You can identify these by asking yourself (honestly) "if I removed this event or character, would I still be able to build to the end of the book without losing too much?"

-Are there any characters, scenes, or plot elements that you must add for the book to be rich enough or to make sense?

-Are there any logical issues or inconsistencies with the world-building or plot?

-And the lesson I learned from Insurgent: are there any inconsistencies that resulted from writing scenes out of order or from author confusion? (Like magically disappearing guns, characters who are in places they shouldn't be, characters with two different names, etc.)

With those questions in mind (and more of your own, I'm sure), I read through my draft quickly. I say "quickly" because it's not useful, at this stage, for me to address sentence issues or take notes about sentence or paragraph-level problems-- this is just the first read-through. What I want to notice are BIG things, and a quick read-through is good for letting me do that while helping me to set aside smaller concerns.

While I'm reading, I'm looking for both problems and opportunities. When I notice a problem ("Christina disappears after page 30"), I jot it down in the left column in my notebook, along with page numbers or other references. When I notice a place in which a problem can probably be addressed (like: "Christina could be present in this scene on page X, and this one on page Y"), I write it in the right column with page numbers or other references.

When I'm finished, I make sure that I have a solution planned for each problem I've recognized. If not, I brainstorm them. Then I arrange my solutions into a big long list, and...well, I'll save the next step for another day.

So there you have it: the "ah crap, this draft is le terrible" revision read-through.

How Much It Changed

SPOILER ALERT: This post will contain a lot of Divergent spoilers, so if you haven't read the book and want to keep yourself spoiler-free, close the blog.

The Twitterverse throws a lot of questions my way, and the most surprising one (surprising because of how often it's asked, not because of what it is) is: how much did Divergent change between the first draft and the published book?

This question is often asked by aspiring authors, and I never know quite what they want to hear. Do they want to hear that it didn't change at all, because that means their manuscript might not change that much? Will they think I don't deserve the book deal if they find out it changed a lot? Or do they want to hear that it changed a lot, because that means their manuscript might get snatched up by a publisher just because it has potential, regardless of whether it's perfect or not? The lesson in this is really: don't compare yourself to other people. Every manuscript and every writer is different. But just because it might interest you, I'll tell you about Divergent.

The First Draft

The rough draft of Divergent was about 56,000 words long. For those of you who don't speak word count, 56,000 words is a little less than 200 pages (at an average of 300 words per page, given the font size/spacing I usually use). It followed this outline:

-Tris takes her aptitude test and gets an inconclusive result
-Tris chooses Dauntless, Caleb chooses Abnegation
-(One-paragraph summary of the physical aspect of Dauntless training)
-Tris undergoes several simulations and bonds with Christina, Al, and Will, and somewhere in there, Tris gets attacked
-Tris and Four find out that Erudite's planning an attack
-The attack simulation happens, with Tris and Four immune
-Tris and Tobias storm Dauntless headquarters and shut down the simulation

So, essentially, the book was the same (with the big exception of Caleb), except smaller. Certain sections just didn't exist, including the first phase of Dauntless training, the Ferris wheel scene, Visiting Day, the visit to the fence, the visit to Caleb at Erudite headquarters, and the zipline scene. Certain characters also didn't exist, such as Uriah, Lynn, and Marlene.

The first draft, after some basic copy-edits, was pretty clean. I had received feedback from my critique partners as well as my agent on my previous manuscript that I applied to this one--such as removing things like "she reached out and picked up" and replacing it with "she picked up." (How did I not think of that myself? I still don't know. But thank goodness for critiquers.) Also, I used to work as a proofreader, so I had a pretty good knowledge of grammar and punctuation rules and I applied them as best I could. The only reason I mention this is that I believe (with no research to back it up) that it will help you a lot in your agent search if your manuscript is clean. If a manuscript has bad grammar and punctuation, it won't matter how brilliant the ideas or characters are, because agents won't be able to get through it. Just a side note.

The Second Draft

It's a bit of an oversimplification to say "the second draft," because the book actually went through several rounds of revision before I arrived at what I would call the second draft. One of them was with my current agent, after signing with her. Throughout this process, I added about 30,000 words, so the second draft was about 85,000 words long, or a little less than 300 pages in Word.

I didn't take anything out. My agent thought that what was there was good, but it was all so sparse that it wasn't living up to its potential. I needed to reveal more about Erudite, so I reconstructed Caleb, giving him Erudite leanings and having him choose Erudite instead of Abnegation. The side effect of this was that it added depth to the Prior family dynamic (yay!). I added Visiting Day (to flesh out the Divergent plotline better), the visit to the fence (for world-building/faction-building), and the entire first phase of Dauntless training (faction-building and atmosphere-building, as well as certain character arcs). I also changed the ending, because I'd never been happy with it.


The Last Draft

After the book deal, I went through a few rounds of revision with my editor. I added another 20,000 words, so the final draft clocks in at about 105,000 words, or 400 pages in Word. A lot of the changes were subtle-- I described more Chicago landmarks, I changed some of the friendship dynamics slightly. Many of the bigger changes came from a single question: if Dauntless is so awful and brutal, why on earth would Tris stay in it? Isn't she brave enough to defect and be factionless, if the Dauntless environment is that bad?

That was where the ziplining scene and the ferris wheel scene came from, as well as all the interactions with Uriah, Lynn, and Marlene. I needed to show that just like every other faction, Dauntless was a mixture of good and bad, and had veered from its original intentions-- but its original intentions were still there, in certain members and activities.

Again, I didn't cut anything, really. There was a lot of tweaking-- a few details in a few places can go a long way! For me, looking at the final draft is like looking at a skeleton with a body built around it. I can still see the bones from the first draft, but now they are stronger because they have flesh surrounding them.

So, that was my Divergent editing journey!

How I Revise: Insurgent Edition

I'm not a huge fan of coming up with a revising system. I've heard before that every book is different, and I've found that to be true. Some come out quickly and easily. Some are painful and difficult. Some have gaping plot holes that need to be patched; some are coherent from the get-go but need work in other areas. I don't think how much revision is required necessarily reflects poorly on the work or on the writer. I do think revision is when the real work is done, and because each book is different, I've never done it the same way twice. I may find a good system later, when I have more experience, but right now I'm letting what the book requires dictate how I revise it.

Divergent came out clean and well-paced, but it was sparse and unbalanced. And Insurgent? Well, it came out as a big mess, like I hurled every single idea I had into a word document and then had to sort through it to find the good stuff. Finally, during this round of edits, I feel like it's clean again, and I thought it might be interesting to show you what I did with it.

I don't usually use Scrivener, but that's mostly because I had a PC until earlier this year, and they only just came out with Scrivener for Windows. So I didn't write the Insurgent draft in Scrivener, I wrote it in Word and decided to revise it in Scrivener this time. First I fed the manuscript in by importing the document and splitting it into chapters. Then I further subdivided it into manageable sections. Note: the actual manuscript doesn't have parts (you know, with a separate page saying PART 2, etc.), these are just chunks I found useful for editing purposes.


Then I imported my editorial letter, my agent's notes, and my notes from earlier rounds of revisions so that they were all in the same place and I could refer to them easily.

But most importantly, I made lists. I made a list of each character's goals/motivations (and each faction's goals/motivations) so that I could keep the characters consistent and make sure they weren't flat. I made a list of issues I still wasn't sure how to resolve so that I could continue to think about it as I work. And I made a checklist for what to keep in mind while editing the first section. Here, have a look:

When I work, I split the screen so that I can look at the chapter I'm working on on one side, and the editorial checklist for the section on the other side, (and on the far right, comments for the chapter itself, but that's not in this screenshot):

I also used color coding to help myself keep track and to give myself a visual representation of my progress. Blue means "I'm finished! Yay!" and yellow means "I'm currently working on this":

One thing I have used with every manuscript I've revised is checklists. Most of the time those lists are huge, like a page long, and arranged in order of difficulty. (Most difficult first, least difficult last.) This time I decided to go through the manuscript in order instead of arranging things in order of difficulty. It just made more sense for the draft.

That's how I'm revising! How about you?

Knowing When To Trunk

My first post for YA Highway is up today! I've been following that blog for quite some time, so when I got the opportunity to be a contributor, I said, "Um...YES." If you haven't checked it out, please do, it's great.

Anyway, my post is on how to know whether to revise or trunk your manuscript: Love Is Mandatory.