Revision Schmevision: Unflick Your Bic

I'm revising a novel for the first time in my life.

I've written three and a half novels, but after five years, tons of short stories and a couple of comic book scripts, I have finally careened through a novel I think I can handle revising.

Handle?

Yeah. I'm going to be cradling this thing like a baby for the next four months or so and with the help of a revision course (more on that in a minute) I'm going to tear this sucker down, open it from groin to throat and perform some serious surgery.

One of the first couple of lessons Holly Lisle tosses me has an interesting step. You reread your manuscript (pen in hand this time) and highlight, circle, underline, somehow tag sections you want to change based on their impact on character, world, story, and so on. You also tag the sections you want to keep.

Holly Lisle has written many books and can be found here (takes your to her post on revising a novel). She opened up a novel revision course about two or three years ago and I was one of the first students. Like most online courses, she gave the option of handling the course weekly, or if you're like me, sitting on the course until all the lessons came through and plowing through them. So of course I forgot I had signed up for it for about two or three years. Until this January, anyway.

I didn't really forget, I just kind of thought I hadn't written anything worth revising. I was scared to face the crap I had spewed out during the Nano marathons and my tendency to write quickly and remorselessly, which is to say, making little use of the delete key. I would finish a work and know deep in my heart that it wasn't what I wanted when I started out, but had no idea how to get there.

We all have different ways of dealing with this kind of gap. Some of us try over and over until we just break that wall down with our heads. Some of us join critique groups so people who are not us can articulate the problems we know are there but just can't see. Some of us spend a lot of money on something so terrifying that it is best left a guilty secret in our browser history.

I finally decided I might as well utilize this money sink, but I made one important change this past Nanowrimo season. I went into Nano knowing I would have to be able to see this book again. I would have to be able to live with this hunk of ink and paper for a year. Maybe more. If it gets published, the rest of my life even.

The novel I got wasn't the one I originally wanted, but it was far better than the ones I've attempted before. When I got bored with my writing I put something interesting in, even if it didn't make sense. I wrote notes to myself if I didn't like how a scene went, so that I could see later how I wished it had gone. I put myself in the headspace of expecting to see these words again, over and over. Forcing my dorky character to be cool yet adorable, forcing my whiny little boy character to say awesomely inappropriate things, forcing my characters and my plots to bow to my whims made me confident that I could handle looking at this thing again someday.

I still wound up with a pile of crap. Such is Nanowrimo. But this time I wound up with crap I could smush down again and throw back on the wheel to re-shape.

Lisle's first couple of lessons really help with that. In the first few lessons, she had me go through the manuscript and tag sections on character, world, story, and others, that I would have to change. She also had me tag sections to keep.

Now when I'm feeling like I just need to light this thing on fire, I can look at the (short) glorious list in my notebook of all the sections I want to keep in my novel. I know that keeper section is there for a reason more than making me put the lighter down, but when I get really frustrated I flip to that section and reread a couple of lines and recharge my creative fortitude. It's not all suckitude, it's not all pear-shaped mischaracterized unthemed dreck. Whether or not you use a course or sheer willpower for revising your work, I highly recommend a greatest hits list of quotes that you wrote. In that crucial moment, it just might help you unflick that bic. This is no time for a massive writer freakout. These manuscripts aren't going to red pen themselves.

Nanowrimo Break: Sleepless and Bitty Details

Sleepless by Charlie Huston is one of those near future science fiction things you hear about but never realized exists until you hold it in your hands. It's detailed.

Most of the time when someone says 'detailed' he means 'they talked about a space ship a lot and maybe there was a character and stuff happened.' Or maybe the author dedicated forty pages on fashion styles to explain why the protagonist took that parasol with those boots.

Sleepless is detailed in that every part of the world - the WOW game stand-in, the human bombs, the devastating disease - are effortlessly referenced in sentences and phrases before Huston dedicates entire scenes to explaining just what the hell is going on. The background details are such a part of the world that his characters live these pieces of science fiction and the reader can breathe it all in without pausing to admire the damn spaceship for pages on end. Think of the last time you had a fight with a friend on a message board and tried to explain to someone (to whom message boards did not exist) how you had trouble communicating in real time. The important part of the story you are telling this person is not that you have to wait minutes, hours, or days to get the last-last word in, but that you are having an argument with a friend and the bastard won't lay down and accept defeat in light of your brilliance. In between recounting witty repartee, you still have to explain message boards. That's the importance of detail.

As I Nano (only four thousand words behind, it's okay, that's a weekend marathoner, no problem) I have to keep detail in mind because while it's tempting to boost a word count with nonsense like two thousand words of what color sneakers my character has on, the bits I get to keep later while Nanoedmo'ing (National Novel Editing Month) are the pieces that advance the story while maintaining a careful snare around the reader's attention.

If you have a minute in between typing madly and procrastinating just as madly, give Sleepless a try. It's science fiction without the spaceships and it's a brilliant apocalypse that will make you wonder about the tiny things in life. And if near future science fiction can't make you doubt every minuscule interaction in your life with a tiny shake of fear, it's obviously not trying hard enough.

Another detailed series I've always enjoyed are the Company novels by Kage Baker. She takes history and future with the same finesse, and while she shines with historical detail I'll admit my favorite of the series is Graveyard Games where she really starts telling us about her world's terrifying future.

Nanowrimo Break: Handwavium and Transitions

John Connolly's Every Dead Thing is a little rough, and one of the most delightfully gory mysteries I've torn through in a long while. For someone who usually devours horror movies and peppers her sci-fi diet with The Cat Who... Every Dead Thing was a welcome respite. Though it suffers from the tragic past hero, it has an intriguing (and conveniently helpful) secondary cast of an assassin and master thief, Every Dead Thing moves quickly through sometimes not quite explained transitions. We are at point A, now we are at Point B, now we see my old friend. Now my old friend is dead, look at my dead old friend, meticulously dissected atop his equally dead wife in a creepy yet totally memorable scene.

Anyway, this is one of those books (and series) I return to when I want some handwavium. My transitions usually suffer from real-worldism, where we actually have to walk out to the car, and open the door, and fiddle with our keys. In book world, we are simply driving. Last page we were in San Francisco, and now we are in Las Vegas! Did we mean to be in Las Vegas? Who knows? Who cares! Look at the pretty lights!

Writing 50,000 words in 30 days means taking some big leaps of faith in terms of travel, changing groups of people, and on occasion, surprise action scenes. Writing at any point can use a little handwavium, so long as your reader can handle a little handwavium. Remember suspension of disbelief, and the value of your reader coming back for the sequel.

Something I find helps is sitting for a few minutes and asking myself what is absolutely necessary to get this message across? Do I need to show us on the road? Do I need to explain the ninja? Can we just have the evil guy over here, suddenly? Would that be really cool? When I strip the scenes down to the absolutes, it makes the writing go faster, the reading, and at times, the head scratching. Anyway, if "The Most Terrifying Thriller Since Silence Of The Lambs" (see cover above) is not your slice of pie, try Jim Butcher's Dresdenfiles. For some reason, I have Small Favor listed on my outline for this post, so I suppose it must be an example of handwavium. I recommend the whole series, just so you too can spend all of White Knight with a big fan-service grin on your face.