Catherine Stine's IDEA CITY

Welcome Visitors

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Indie Life Wednesday-the art of revision

Today, for Indie Life, I'm talking about revision, that dreaded word, or not. As for me, I love it. I'd rather be polishing a draft than banging out the first, rough one. You need to learn to love it, ESPECIALLY as an indie author, because anything you put out into the world needs to be flawless--the plot, the grammar and punctuation, the characterizations.

Tools to help in this regard:

Scrivener: I love their virtual corkboard where you can endlessly rearrange a set of virtual Index cards that you create. If your eyes cross while staring at the cards, you can toggle between this and a more traditional line-by-line plot outline.

Upload your daily revision to your Kindle and read it with new eyes: It looks like a book, it reads like a book (well, an ebook), and you'll notice errors that you never saw when you read it on your screen or paper manuscript.

Nanowrimo: National Novel Writing Month, where you bang out a novel length manuscript in 30 days. It'll either break you or make you super strong (Or both?). You'll be amazed at how much you can write. No really! Now they even have July and August summer camp with virtual bunkmates.

Your writing group: get in one, trust them, and run everything by them. Only choose authors whose work you love and respect.

I'll leave you with a few awesome quotes from authors on the revision process:

“By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.” — Roald Dahl

“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft. Begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in the edit.” — Will Self

“Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do.— Stephen King, On Writing

Wishing you a productive and creative revision process!
What's your most helpful revision tool?

22 comments:

  1. For me, my most helpful revision tools include my Kindle (to read my story with fresh eyes), my crit group, and my developmental editor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great post. I'm a big fan of the creation. Also of "having written." The half year that I've been editing this ol' ms. has taken a lot from me. In fact, I changed my email tag line from a positive quote from Emerson to this one: Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten - Paul Engle Because it's emblematic for this book. I LOVE the idea of uploading to Kindle (saves paper)! Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great revision ideas. I like to have someone besides myself read it outloud. I can hear awkward spots that way.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Elisabeth, yes, it's my newest fun editing tool--just upload a doc, no need to even change it to a PDF--somehow the type stays larger that way. Yes, EW, listen to it out loud. There's a text to speech function--on kindle?? where you can hear it read by a digital voice.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I always revise in a different format. Saving another version as a .pdf is great too. The different view lets you see mistakes easily. Just keep in mind you can't go from .pdf back to Word, so save a duplicate to change to a .pdf.

    ReplyDelete
  6. As for writing the whole draft before revising...well...I was 45 chapters in and one of my characters revealed something and I had to go back and fix things.

    Regarding Scrivener, have it and still can't figure it out even though I've read the instructions several times. ***shrugs***

    Hugs and chocolate,
    Shelly

    ReplyDelete
  7. I love revising. It's definitely my favorite part :).

    ReplyDelete
  8. I didn't know about viewing on Kindle. I think that's a great idea and I'm going to try it.
    I need some good readers. I'm working on a novel now that focuses on how mothers get lost in their lives once they have children, and none of my readers are mothers. I feel like I definitely need a mother to read it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. My editor is most helpful. He seems to find the things that need to most work. Although he's expensive, he's worth it.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Writing is definitely all about the revising. I love that quote from Will Self.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I am learning to love Scrivener and I'm with you. I'd much rather be editing than writing a first draft.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Miranda, I'm with you on that invaluable editor! And, Cherie, I love the Will Self quote, and also his writing.

    ReplyDelete
  13. 'you'll notice errors that you never saw when you read it on your screen or paper manuscript.'

    Totally! Even just switching fonts on the ms in WORD casts an entirely new light on stuff we'd otherwise just glaze over.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Great ideas, Catherine. I need to see if I can upload a story to my iPad. Bet it would show all my mistakes. :) My crit groups are awesome too.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I'm in the middle of revision right now too! I both love it and hate it. Love making my story perfect, hate going over it so many times I begin to wonder if it's any good at all!

    My advice, get a good critique. If you can't find a critique partner, pay someone! And what you really want is someone who will talk about plot, pacing, characterisation etc, not look for grammar or spelling (that comes later).

    Rinelle Grey

    ReplyDelete
  16. Rinelle, I totally agree! Even though I'm in a great critique group, I always hire a professional editor for that last polish.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Most helpful revision tool is the beta reader.

    ReplyDelete
  18. I do a lot of revising/editing as I go. It's the way my mind works. I start each day inputting the corrections I made on what I wrote the day before [I print out what I did when I'm done]. I don't leave that chapter behind until I'm satisfied. This makes my first drafts slower, but gives me lest revisioning on the backend. And I quite like it that way. I agree about the 150 times through... more. I get so sick of it by the time I'm done, I think it's the most horrible boring story in existence, flat, unsurprising... I realize it's just because I've read it a few hundred times by then.

    ReplyDelete
  19. M Pax, your post made me laugh, because, yeah, reading anything that many times would make a person sick of something. I go through that too. But then much later, picking up something I've written afresh, I'm usually thinking, wow, this is pretty darn good. :)

    ReplyDelete
  20. YWriter's a great bit of freeware that allows a story to be organised according to chapters, and scenes and you can get stats on how often the POV is from one or another character...it also tracks your daily wordcount and you can set yourself writing targets and upload character images into character index card. I'll try uploading to Kindle I think that's a great idea!

    ReplyDelete
  21. Love the RD quote! I also have King's book on writing, but I've not had time to read it properly yet. I love NaNoWriMo - it's so frigging wonderful! I always tell people about it when they say they'd like to write something.

    ReplyDelete