Revisions, Yay!

[lydamorehouse]

I am such a weirdo.

I think that pretty sums up everything you might need to know about me, but I was thinking specifically of the fact that, unlike almost every other writer I know, I ADORE the revision process. I think it's the sense of accomplishment I get while I'm going through each page. In front of me today is a big pile of paper. It's a completed (if somewhat flawed) story. I don't have to figure out how it's going to end any more. It's written. I may, in point of fact, need to utterly CHANGE the ending for the novel to actually be any good, but I have a spare, you know?

I like that feeling. A lot.

Even though I know that when I get through this round of revisions another one is on its heels (or waiting in the wings and other such metaphors) -- around and around until publication.

But, you know, I've taken my first stab at it. I hit something. Now I just have to make sure my aim is true and I hit home.

Which is kind of a disturbing image since last night I had a really awful nightmare about discovering a serial killer had been to my house while I was away. And then I became a strange sort of magical-yet-evil house spirit myself who continued the killing spree. It was particularly disturbing because it's one of the first dreams that I remember taking place in THIS house, exactly as it's laid out. Usually, I have a stock stand-in metaphor for my house. It's partly my parent's house combined with this one with bits of other houses or apartments I've lived in or known, and a hotel (or a museum). But it's always generally the same place that my subconscious has dubbed "my house" even though it looks nothing like the place in which I currently reside. So besides being creepily violent, it was also very specific.

Banish, banish, banish!

Luckily, it's incredibly beautiful outside today and I have something I'm looking forward to doing in front of me. I'm sitting on the porch with the windows cracked open. There's coffee in the pot and a cat perched on the head of my chair behind me. The thing that's going to be hard is to stay indoors, when what I really want to do is start mucking about in the garden (even though there's still patches of stubborn snow in our back yard.) We're going to expand Mason's veggie garden this year. I really want to try growing lettuce. The seed catalogues all have these cute little individual serving size minature lettuce varieties and I just adore them. I want to see them growing in neat little rows in Mason's garden.

Ah, hurry up summer!!

Comments

[karenhealey.livejournal.com]

I LOVE revision. It's my favourite part of the process - so much so that I sort of view first drafts as what I have to get through to finally get to the good part.

Rewriting

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

There are so many counts on which it is just as well that I am no longer a writer, that I feel vaguely guilty about reminiscing about the days when I was trying to write. But I always enjoyed the second draft the most. The first draft was classic, "Sit down at the typewriter and open a vein," but the second was where a potentially publishable document was created. The instant I needed to go to a third draft, though (which I did only when editors insisted), it was really depressing. I do not recall ever changing an ending for an editor, though, and that, too, is just as well.

Nate

[voxmyriad.livejournal.com]

I'm only just starting to think of my writing as something that might actually be read by other people someday (thanks in great part to my editor and co-writer, who is a bottomless pit endless font of squee whenever I email something else to her), so I'm beginning to move into the multiple-drafts mindset. I don't know how I feel about it yet. I've never liked going over my stories before, but I never had anyone else to hand them off to before.

I guess we'll find out?

I hate dreams that take place in actual spots I know. Oni ga soto! ("Spirit, get out!" in Japanese. It works!)

[planetalyx.livejournal.com]

It's not just you--I love revising, too. There's something so satisfying about that moment when something goes from almost-there to golden... it's a feeling that never loses its joy.