Welcome to another post of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG), a network of bloggers who post every first
Wednesday of the month about problems in writing and how to solve
them. It was founded by blogger/author Alex Cavanaugh. This month it
is co-hosted by Lee Lowery, Juneta Key, Yvonne Ventresca, and T. Powell Coltrin. This month’s IWSG writing
problem that I’ll discuss here at the Far Out Fantastic Site is how
to stay motivated with revising your story.
Even though I’ll
read them, I was never a big fan of writing long works of fiction. I
am more of a short story writer. However, my current novella, titled
Invasion of the Avatars,
that I’m working on is the long work that I’ve stayed with the
longest so far. Because I’m ADD, it’s hard for me to stay focused
on writing long fiction such as novels. Yet, I’ve always wanted to
try my hand at writing a novel, so one NaNoWriMo, the nationwide
novel writing challenge that occurs each November, I compromised with
myself and so decided to write a novella. I never finished it. The
rough draft that is. Then during the NaNoWriMo of that following year
I tried writing another novella, Invasion of the Avatars,
and that one I finished. About three months later. Then, so I could
get a fresh reading of it, I set it aside for about six months and
then took it back out to revise it. I only got about five pages into
it before I got bored with the story and determined that I would not
be able to stick with revising 80 to 100 pages. So I left it saved
and shut it away on my flash drive for good. Or so I thought.
About a year or two
later, last NaNoWriMo to be exact, I tried writing another novella.
Like the first one, I didn’t finish it. I felt like the story
wasn’t going anywhere or maybe going in too
many directions beyond meaning. So I ditched that one, thinking,
maybe I should try to resume writing my previous novella. Avatars
had been shut away on the flash drive for at least a year since I
first tried revising it. But I pulled it back out and decided to work
on it again thinking that if by page five I still felt the same way
about it as I had the first time, then I’ll just forget that story
permanently. However, by the time I got through page five I wanted to
do more. So I printed up five more pages and read over those making
revisional comments. I was still enthused about the story during this
second attempt at revision. So far I’ve revised 25 pages of
Avatars.
Why the sudden
change in attitude toward a novella that I thought I would never be
able to stick with? I believe it was because I put it aside for a
longer period of time than I did after I first wrote it. After that
first attempt at revision, I put it aside for at least a year which
was double the time span than that from when I had left it aside the
first time. And so by this point I could get into the story more
because it was like a brave new world to me. I had alienated the
story from myself for a longer period. So when I tried reading it
over the second time, it was almost as if I had never seen the draft
before.
Stephen King says in
his memoir, On Writing, that when you take out your manuscript
after having kept it in a drawer for several weeks and “if it looks
like an alien relic bought at a junk-shop or yard sale where you can
hardly remember stopping, you’re ready” to revise it.* In other
words, if you hardly recognise your story then you can revise it more
objectively and so as if somebody else wrote it. So if you alienate
your story from yourself long enough and then finally look at it and
the story’s setting, situations and characters appear unfamiliar to
you, then you are ready to revise because you will be more intrigued
by it as if it was uncharted territory to explore.
How long do you set
your first draft of a story aside before you start revising it? Does
the story look as if it were written by someone else when you start
revising?
Until next time . .
.
*Stephen King, On
Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,
Pocket Books 2001.
Wish that worked on the first draft.
ReplyDeleteI usually start edits within a week of reaching the end. Which works because by that time I have completely forgotten the beginning and it's all brand new to me.
The faster you can forget the story, which is your case, the better. Normally I have to put mine aside for a month to get a fresh look at it! That's with short stories, which I mostly write. For novellas it's longer.
DeleteLove On Writing. It's my Bible.
ReplyDeleteI used to go quite a while between finishing a book and revising, but with publisher deadlines, that isn't possible anymore. Sometimes I've taken long breaks from a book, and then it feels like someone else wrote it. It does give you a whole new appreciation for it.
The thing I like about On Writing is that it's not only a "how-to" or instructional but it's also King's autobiography (a.k.a. memoir) in relation to his writing career. That's what makes it so motivating.
Delete