I have a confession: I am an A-bomber*.

            *when it comes to revising.

A quick refresher: A while back, I posted about MentalRevision tools and made an observation about fixing a manuscript with a sniper line versus A-bombing it. Basically, my meaning was that sometimes a well-placed, well-crafted line (a sniper’s bullet) can clear up a whole issue and save yourself from obliterating everything (the A-bomb).

At the time of that post, the revision tool was formulated based on my critiques of other people’s works. I’d even talked some of my friends’ fingers off the big, red button…or in this case, the delete key. What I didn’t realize until I was preparing to speak about it at a recent workshop is that I am totally an A-bomber. One-hundred percent, through and through.

Nearly every time I receive major feedback on a novel, I find myself opening a new document – blank page and blinking cursor – thinking, “It’s just going to be easier, cleaner, and faster to construct a draft this way.”  And then, “I’ll cut and paste a lot of things in here from the old stuff – most of the book, in fact.”  But as I went on, I’d get farther away from the earlier iteration and less of the text worked. By the time I was done, I had an entirely different book on my hands.

In a post-mortem of my most recent (shelved) novel, I figured that I had written it from scratch three times (though, to be fair, I revised those rewrites a couple times each). This self-realization scared me because I’d been blind to it for years – joyfully hitting the delete key seemingly on a whim. What, dear friends, drove me to be so trigger happy?

My theory: A-bombing is the polar opposite of a writer refusing to change a single word when being critiqued. I want to make my work “right” so badly (i.e. I want to please my critiquer) that I happily toss out the baby, the bathwater, and – hell, even the tub – in order to create what I perceive as the desired solution.

So, going back to the original topic’o’the week, how do my first and last drafts compare?

Often, they barely even resemble each other.

And, ultimately, that’s a big issue. My A-bombing led to a series of FIRST drafts, rather than a series of REVISED drafts. Suddenly, all comments from agents (“felt first-drafty”) and friends (“It was a different book than what I read before”) made sense. The lesson became loud and clear: Revision and Rewriting are different things and should not be confused.

Now, as Taila mentioned, there may be times when a manuscript needs an A-bomb (or at least a tactical bunker buster to a second act), but it should be used as a last resort and there should be several trusted readers who turn the keys with you.

I’ve just started the first major revision of my newest WIP. And I’m happily staying far, far away from the big, red button. 

Once, and not nearly as long ago as I want to admit, I had this dream of what writing and publishing a novel would be like.

It was simple, really.  I would sit down to write, and the words would flow like water.  No, like red wine, rich and full-bodied.  I would keep right on going until I got to the end, which would ceremoniously be labeled "THE END," perhaps after a frenzied night of no sleep.  Then I would dash off the manuscript to a publisher, who would recognize it for the work of art it was, and pronounce it perfect.  Done.

There was a time when I actually thought finishing a first draft was the same thing as finishing a novel. 

[Insert maniacal laughter here]

If you've followed the Muses for a while, you might already know that I went through a fairly significant revision process with my agent, before we sent Silver on submission.  In that case, "fairly significant" included throwing out 45,000 words and replotting and rewriting the entire back half of the novel.  That's when I learned that revision can mean rewriting. Before then, I thought revision was polishing and layering within the scenes of the book.  It never occurred to me that the story, characters and structure could (or should) change dramatically from first draft to last. 

I've blogged about my revision process before, and the steps I use to get from first draft to final product, starting with big picture changes and getting smaller and smaller until I'm focused on polishing language and details within individual scenes.  Although every book is different, there are some common threads between my first drafts and the final version.  Big picture-wise, my first drafts tend to be overcomplicated, full of characters, sideplots and twists that usually have to be streamlined in the final version of the novel. 

Within the scenes themselves, I have the opposite problem.  The writing itself sometimes lacks emotion and tension, and is sparse on visual details and setting, while heavy on stage directions, body movements and cliche.

It's no wonder that often when I'm writing a first draft, I feel like a complete fake.  I know I'm writing something that will never be fit for anyone to see.  But I've also learned that it can be just a matter of getting some words, even crappy ones, on paper, so I'll have something to revise later.

I thought I'd share a short excerpt from Silver from first draft to final product, to show how even this tiny piece of a scene evolved and changed from the beginning to the final draft. 

In this scene, Brianna is on her first date with Blake, in a restaurant with two of their friends, Austin and Haley.  A female server arrives to take their order.  Here's the first version:

A waitress (I still can't bring myself to use the politically correct term 'server') comes by to take our order.  I am definitely going with a small salad, still fairly certain I won't be able to choke down a meal under the circumstances.  "Blake! Omigod!" She literally squeals, bouncing up and down like a puppy until Blake stands up and gives her a quick hug.  "Does Daddy know you're here?"

Blake shakes his head.

The waitress pats Blake's shoulder with her palm before pulling out a pad to take our order.  She is tall and thin with layered chestnut hair that falls just below her shoulders.  Her wide brown eyes are balanced by a long nose and big lips.  Even as she takes our orders, she keeps looking back at Blake and smiling.

As soon as the girl leaves, Austin balls up his napkin and tosses it at Blake, hitting him in the chest.  "Please say you didn't."

Blake grabs the napkin and throws it back.  It just misses Austin's head, before making contact with the wall and sliding to the table.  Austin grabs the napkin and stares at Blake, waiting.

"I didn't." Blake delivers the line straight, but his knowing grin belies the statement.

Austin takes a drink of water shaking his head.  "You're an idiot."

My thoughts on this initial pass:

Blake has a past with the server, and I think that this first version does get that point across, but Brianna is a detached observer, just reporting this important reveal with no emotion or reaction at all.  The physical description of the server is boring, and we don't even get her name, even though she has a role in the story later on. The worst part of the scene for me is that there is almost no tension, despite the fact that Blake and Brianna are on a date, and the girl taking their order has a past with Blake.  There is also no hint of the supernatural, even though Portia is tied up in Blake's world.

Part of the reason for these missing parts, is that I didn't know how this character fit into the overall structure of the story until much later- part of first drafting for me is discovering new story elements as I write.  Part of it was that I was focused on getting to other aspects of the scene as I drafted.  Part of it was just my process of getting the plot out first and layering in emotion later.

Compare that version with the final version:

A tall girl with porcelain skin comes by to take our order.  I am definitely going with a small salad, still fairly certain I won't be able to choke down a meal under the circumstances.  

"Blake! Omigod!" the server literally squeals, bouncing up and down like a puppy until Blake stands up and gives her a quick hug.  "Does Daddy know you're here?"

"Hey, Portia," Blake says as he sits back down.  "Don't bother Rush right now, okay?"

Portia pats Blake's shoulder with her palm before pulling out a pad to take our order.  She flips her chin so her smooth chestnut hair falls just in front of her shoulder.  She's pretty like a pond full of brown water, beautiful until you look too close.  A dark cloud sits just beneath the surface of her gaze as she takes Haley's order. 

When her eyes rest on me, the cloud rises all the way to the top, like someone's poked the water with a stick.  "What are you?" she asks.

I want to back up, but there's nowhere to go in the booth next to the wall.  The words echo in my head.  Not who, what.  "What am I having?"

"Right." Portia taps her pen on the pad in front of her.  "What are you having?"

I fidget under her stare, rattling off my order.  She doesn't write it down.  It's not until she walks away that I realize what's made me so uncomfortable.  Girls tend to treat me in a mostly normal way, but even they don't stare at me.  Not like that.  I put my hands in my lap and finger my bracelet. 

Austin balls up his napkin and tosses it at Blake, hitting him in the chest.  "Please tell me you didn't."

Blake grabs the napkin and throws it back.  It just misses Austin's head, before making contact with the wall and sliding to the table.  Austin grabs the napkin and stares at Blake, waiting.

"Okay, I didn't." Blake delivers the line straight, but his knowing grin tells another story.  The scientist in me takes takes in the full implications of this exchange with detached interest.  The crazy girl in me wants to strangle them both for even having this conversation in front of me.  So Blake hooked up with Portia?  Logically, I know his past is littered with girls.  It's just not something I want thrown in my face. 

I'm the last person they should be having this conversation in front of.  I try to give Blake a pass.  He doesn't know he's literally playing with fire.

"You're an idiot," Austin says.  

I could think of  a few more choice words.  I bite them back.


Looking back at this passage now, there are more changes I would make, but they're primarily minor line edits.  Substantively, I think this passage works much better.  We get a sense of the tension, not only from Brianna's point of view as she listens to her date admit he hooked up with the waitress at some point  in the (recent?) past, but we also get a sense of Portia, and the tension she feels when she sees Blake with Brianna.  There's a subtler, paranormal, undertone here too, since Portia seems to actually "see" Brianna, who is usually protected by magic.

Did you know that back in the day, authors like Charles Dickens used to write their novels in serial form for newspapers?  They often thought up the next chapter as they wrote it, sending it in with its cliff-hanger ending weekly or monthly, stringing the readers along (so much so that American readers crowded the docks for the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, shouting at the crew of an incoming ship, "Is Nell dead?").

Dickens was a master of the episodic novel.  But somehow - by some miracle or possibly just sheer genius - he managed to pull it off and create a coherent story that could eventually be compiled and published as a single volume.

Me?  Not so much.  I'm pretty great at writing an episodic novel (just ask my editor), but coherent?  I kind of need to work on that.  Which is why I love revision.  By the end of all my edits, I have a very different book - one that shows the bones of the original, but (hopefully) contains so much more.  Including a plot.

GILT was originally almost 500 manuscript pages long.  There were breaks in the middle where I left off and started up in a different place.  I'd write long, involved tangents and realize they were going nowhere.  And then write another one.

I wrote a prologue.  And then sat in a critique group with Bret and heard the reaction to his prologue.  I cut that sucker out pretty quick.  Kitty had no one to love in the first draft.  Her life was sheer hell.  There was no romance - it was a story about a doomed friendship! - and no kissing.  Things happened for no reason.  Let me explain - things happened because history said they happened. But history is not story, so that had to change.

I added plot.

I know, I know.  Doesn't your average writer outline?  Figure out what's going to happen and why before writing the novel?  Apparently, not me.  I just finished Number 3 and I'm still doing the same thing.  Luckily - I've got revision.  And I've learned how to add plot to history.

I do not recommend this.  It is not easy.  And takes up a huge number of pages, a ridiculous amount of time and more than a few tears.  But it's my process.

Now, as a little treat (and for a laugh) here's my original opener for GILT (which was then called Cat's Shadow):

Prologue

February 1542

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.  Of course, no one ever thinks things will end badly, do they?  I never do.   Certainly Cat never did.  Cat always expected things to go exactly the way she wanted them to.  And they always did.  She made sure of it.

I think that’s why I hated her.  Even though she was my best friend.  It was always the two of us together.  Kitty and Cat.  That’s what they called us when we were younger – KittyCat.  It should have been Cat and Kitty.  Cat always came first, even back then.

And the current opening:

1539

“You’re not going to steal anything.”

I left the question—Are you?—off the end of the sentence. But Cat heard it anyway.

“Of course not.” She paused to look at me, shadows eclipsing half her face, blue eyes glittering in the moonlight from the tall, narrow windows of the upper gallery. “I could be flogged. Or pilloried. Or have a hand cut off.”

A drunken roar of laughter vented up through the beams of the great hall below us.

“Or executed,” I muttered.

"First drafts never get published. Never." 

- Darcy Patterson

When I checked out this week's blog theme "First vs. Final Drafts - The Differences," my mind was instantly filled with a plethora of opposites.  Night/Day.  Bad/Good. Before/After.  Begin/End.  Dog/Cat... okay, not that one, but you get the idea.  There's a lot of change between the first draft and the last.  

It's an encouraging point to those of us in the midst of the struggle between version one and version twenty one.  Author Ken Follett says, "The rewrite is very satisfying, because I feel that everything I do is making the book a little better."  But the stakes on each draft are also high.  William Zinsser says, "Rewriting is the essence of writing well--where the game is won or lost."

The Next Draft Means Rethinking.  The Roman poet Horace thought one should wait nine years between the finished first draft and the next version. While I don't know any publisher who's going to support that kind of productivity (or lack of), I do agree that thinking time and distance between drafts is critical.  Early drafts aren't about correcting punctuation errors and edits.  It's about the big picture. Plot. Character.  Setting.  Theme.

The Next Draft Means Thinking BIG.  All of my biggest structural revelations come in later drafts.  It's when I ask myself over and over again, what if?  What if this scene happened first?  What if this character's past wasn't revealed until this moment?  What if this whole chapter moved to ...here?

The Next Draft Means Focusing on the Middle.  In early drafts, I tend to know where I want to start and what is going to be the final outcome.  The middle is definitely the muddle and is often not fully formed until subsequent drafts. Peter Dunne proposes an unusual paradigm for the middle of a story in his book, Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot. Dunne says that the beginning and ending are about plot, or the outer problem. The middle is about what he calls “story” but most of us would call the inner problem. Beginning and ending–action. Middle–character.

Tomorrow, I'm off to write the next draft for Book2 at the Abby of Saint Walburga (or writer's prison, as I like to call it) and I will be taking these reminders for revision with me.  Hopefully, this draft will be one step closer to the "final" one.