I’m a very linear writer. I write my stories from beginning to end without skipping anything or writing anything out of order. In the past, I have tried writing a “fun” scene ahead of schedule, usually in an effort to get myself energized, but it has never worked out. I’ve learned that I am simply incapable of writing a scene until I know exactly what has happened in all the scenes before it. And because I also rarely outline, I never know exactly what has happened in all those scenes until I’ve written them. For me, writing is an act of discovery, and I never know what I will find in a story until I get there.
Because of this, revisions are difficult for me. I don’t mean the subtle fidgeting and adjusting we all do with the words, the language used to tell the story. I mean the big stuff where you realize that a particular moment in the story has come too soon, or too late, or you need to insert a scene here, or a moment there. I mean the type of revision that affects character, or theme, or plot at the fundamental level. In the time it takes me to go back and insert a single page of this deeper kind of revision, I can usually write about ten pages of new material. Deep revising is time consuming and it’s hard. That’s because I can’t simply write a new page, cut, then paste it into the text. It’s more complicated than that.
Working in a deep revision is like going back and dropping a rock in a pond. Once I do that, I’ve disturbed the whole narrative surface and I have to follow the ripples outward in every direction from the point of impact. A deep revision will change characters’ future choices, it may re-tune the tension and conflict, or it might throw off the pacing. I have to trace those effects from one side of the story to the other. I have to go back and make sure I’ve set the new scene up adequately in the preceding pages. I have to follow the story along and see how the deep revision impacts every subsequent scene after it, because it inevitably does.
I know my book needs this new scene. And I know that once I’ve done the work and smoothed the surface back out, the resulting story will be better for it. So that’s what I’m working on.
8 responses to “Follow the Ripples”
Lovely metaphor, and good luck.
Oh crap. Apparently I’ve been doing revisions all wrong.
HA! Or maybe I’m the one doing it wrong!
How do you do it?
I take out all the “that”s and replace them with -ly words.
Maybe this is why my book hasn’t sold…
Hmm. Maybe. Did you also add lots of exclamation marks? Because that always helps!!!
WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT???!!!
Thanks for the tip. Now to find a rock, and a large body of water… You were being literal, right?
I just finished a lot of revisions like that. Guess that’s why it took so long–kept having to go through the entire document and make sure everything still worked and make a million tiny changes because of one thing added or changed. Good luck with yours. It’s only painful because you’re conscientious. If you were sloppy it’d be easy.
It seems to me that every rock dropped into the pond has a backstory you can’t always ignore even if you write linearly. You can’t ignore the rock’s shape, its size, what propelled it, or its composition to fully understand its ripples and splash. Since every story begins in medias res eventually the bog myrtle or something else will come into it.