Tag: revision

So the outline I said I was doing last week ended up not being as helpful as I was hoping. I think the issue is I was still relying on all the ‘well I’m going to write this’ stuff. So this week I worked on actually pulling out the scenes I’ve written that are the most complete. That doesn’t mean they’re great, but they are the closest to what I want in the final story. So now I have an actual starting point instead of just everything still in a jumble of files. It’s bare bones, and it’s ~40k words, which scares me a bit.

I did a lot of writing in October and November, but I knew I wasn’t going to use all of it in the final project. Some of it was background, some of it was playing around with the same scene with a different twist. But to actually pull out what it is that I think I’ll be able to use and have it be that little is just an odd feeling, considering how much I had to actively pull from the last rough draft I was attempting to revise, just to get it down to 100k.

On top of that, I am running into the same problem that I was having in that previous rough draft in that the second half of the story is floundering. Turns out that writing the first half of stories for 20 years gets you really good at writing the first half of stories, and not so good at writing the second half. Go figure.

But now that I know it’s a weakness, I’m going to have to do some super heavy lifting in order to figure out how to write endings. I think part of my problem is that I have such lofty expectations that I feel like if I can’t come up with a world shattering ending (a la the Mistborn trilogy; darn you Brandon Sanderson), then I’m worthless as a writer. I need to not aim for that world shattering ending. Not until I can manage good endings. Otherwise I’m just setting myself up for failure.

Now I have my outline pulled. I think for the rest of this month I am going to focus on fleshing out some character backgrounds and working on a short story that needs a tiny bit of tweaking. Then starting January 1st I will actually jump on this thing and start hammering out the plot (a lot of which will be focused on the second half of the book).

So as I move into my second week of extracting an outline, I am now actually pulling out the outline. Making a file for each section that has the main points of what happens in that section, along with notes of things that I want to happen that I might not have actually written yet.

I just hit a section where I know there are certain things that I want to happen while the characters are in a certain place but I have no idea in what order. The scenes I wrote are not in a particular order. So I just put that I have those points to hit. (It didn’t really occur to me until now that I sucks that I can’t really say much more specific than this because of spoilers. Sad.)

I am about 3/4 the way through the story on writing this. It’s making me realize that I have a lot of planning and writing that I still have to do, which is kind of discouraging. I feel like my writing is so much more complete on older stories. I just have to remember that I have had years of work on those stories and this story is only a few months old. It’s going to need some work, so work it will get.

One of the biggest things I had to accept when I made the move from being someone who wrote all the time to being a writer was that even though you have a rough draft, you are still going to have to do some serious writing and rewriting during the revision process.

This has been a very large step to swallow. I have been writing since, well since I learned how to write, so I have that part doing pretty well. Not saying I don’t have more to learn, but in the overall scale of knowing something vs not knowing something, I know a lot about putting words on the page for a story.

Revision is the big bad scary monster with whom I have virtually no experience. As such, I am going to be recording how the heck I manage the revision of my latest rough draft (which I pounded out in two months) so that when it comes time to do this again, I have a plan to follow.

It also creates the secondary effect of holding me accountable to you, the person who is reading this. Yes, hi. Since now you know I’m doing this revision using the revision pyramid from DIYMFA.

Here are the details:
December 6 – 31 (3.5wks): Extract an Outline
January 1 – February 5 (5wks): Plot and Story
February 6 – 27 (3wks): Main Character
February 28 – March 13 (2wks): Secondary Character(s)
March 14 – April 4 (3wks): World Building
April 5 – April 12 (1wk): Dialogue
April 13 – 27 (2wks): Description
April 28 – May 12 (2wks): Theme
May 13 – 20 (1wk): Line Editing

So about six months worth of work (when you take into account that extracting the outline won’t likely take all of this month. I just have to account for Christmas travel). Seems like a lot looking at it from here. But then that’s why I’m taking it a step at a time.

So far I have spent two days, or about six hours … ish reorganizing my story, which came out in a rather haphazard manner. I put a folder with each ‘scene’ and then put in all of the scenes from those scenes in the proper folder while cutting out some of the notes that I tend to write in-line as I’m going (especially for NaNoWriMo, which allows me to help my word count).

In this next week I’m going to make a spiffy outline with what I have, so I’ll see you next Monday for the next Revision Update.