Blog Chain: Rollicking Revisions

Today’s blog chain is brought to us by Sarah Bromley. She asks: “

How do you handle revisions? Do you revise as you’re writing, or do you wait until you’ve gone through beta readers and crit partners to revise? How soon after you finish do you begin your revisions?”

This is such a timely topic for me right now. I just finished the first draft of my MG and am still working on the first draft of my YA and doing copyedits on INCONVENIENT. So it’s revisions galore! I usually revise once the first draft is done. At one point, I made the mistake of giving people pages to read very early in a project’s development, and it completely threw me off course because it conflicted with my writing process. As I’ve said in the past, I detest outlining. I get a story, characters’ voices, and conflicts. If something is not clicking, I brainstorm with my crit partners (and anyone else who cares to listen) by talking/writing out my issues with the story. Once I smooth out the kinks, I begin writing. The more I write, the more the characters come to life. I may think I know where a character’s personality is headed but fifty pages in, I can be proven wrong. Basically, I work out my novel as I write. So when I sent out those early twenty pages, I didn’t fully know where the story was headed or the nuances of each character and I got many conflicting views and didn’t know where to start. I never did finish that project and won’t. I know better now.

If I’m truly stumped, I wait until I finish the first fifty pages before soliciting outside opinions. With the MG, I went back and forth with my readers about problems I was having before actually giving them the pages to read. Once I finished the first draft, I reread the pages, made notes of what was working and what wasn’t, compiled a list of questions and sent to my readers. With the YA I’m working on, I sent to readers after the first 50+ pages because while I knew where I wanted the story to go and had a clear vision of each character, I was out of ideas of how to get from point A to point B. After getting feedback, I put the manuscript aside for two months, and after finishing another project finally see what I need to do. Now, I’m going to write and no one will see it until I’m completely finished. I’m really energized about it again, but wish me luck anyway. 🙂

Share your revision process and be sure to check out Eric’s excellent post from yesterday.