How I Revise Pt. 1

Notice I didn't say, "How To Revise." Because I know two things about revising: Everyone does it differently and you should constantly be revising (hee hee, see what I did there?) your technique, adding new tricks and tools to your Revising Tool Box.

I'm on the very last pass of my ms before sending it to my ninja agent. While I'm nervous about her reading it (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF VODKA LOVE IT AS MUCH AS I DO!) I'm also so proud of it that I could burst. Ultimately you need to be in that place with your ms - you need to feel that it's the best thing you've ever done. And you can only get to that place if you've been Ming the Merciless while revising.

Here's how I do it:

1) Rewrite. I write the first draft, then immediately go back and revise it into a second draft. Why? I do this because I'm a pantser, not a plotter. I don't know where I'm going in the story until I get there, so when I get to the end I'm often like, "Who knew that guy was a jerk?" Which is fine, but I need to go back through the draft make sure those connections make sense, that the seeds of the ending are there in the beginning. If you are a plotter and know exactly where you are going, you may not need this step. But it can't hurt.

2) Beta readers. I wrote extensively on Betas here a while back. To sum up - you need them and you need to be very clear on what feedback you are looking for. Then, you need to carefully consider that feedback. Some advice might make total sense immediately, while other advice might be painful to hear. Read the feedback and consider it carefully. Consider the source, meaning, every reader has their biases. Be aware of where your Betas are coming from so you can weigh their feedback accordingly. Finally - do not let your ego get in the way. If feedback is wounding your ego, it's probably on target.

3) Wait. At least a day between getting your Beta feedback and starting revisions. It's a wonderful thing what your subconscious can come up with while you are sleeping or watching the Vampire Diaries - as long as you give it a bit of time. Sit with the feedback. It's the pause that refreshes.*

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Which will be coming on Thursday!

In the meantime a question: What's your revision style?

*I forget which soft drink this slogan is from, but whoever you are, please don't sue me. I love fizzy drinks!

After THE END

On New Year's Eve, right before fireworks and falling into bed (because that's the kind of party girl I'm not) I wrote THE END on my current book, FIND ME.

The next day, my eldest gave me a card she drew. It said - Did you write a Book? YOU DID? Good Job! (many smiley faces and flowers)(Can't find the card now, but when I do, I'll post it here. You know it's totally adorable.)

If you get a card from your kid, that means you're all done, right? No....
After taking a couple of weeks to noodle around with an ending I was just not happy with, I'm now ready to put FIND ME out to Beta readers - ALMOST.

Here are the things I had to do to make it ready. It's my Get Ready For Prime Time Check List:

1) Spell Check
Yeah, duh. But you'd be surprised how in the heat of writing you can misspell exhilerate. excillerate. exhilarate. Spell check also catches repeated words. His his or or on on - when I'm cutting and pasting I'll inevitably leave behind some orphan prepositions. And the grammar check wants to ask you if you really need quite so many fragments.

2) TK
TK is copy edit short hand for To Come, as in, I can't stop to look this up right now so I'm going to slap on a TK and move on. Yesterday I filled in my TK's which means I did the following google searches (in case the FBI is wondering about my browser cache)

• Quote from The Neverending Story
• MTA Maps
• Irish Football shirts
• Latin phrases
• Indigenous place names in Northern New Jersey
• Scouting NY (an awesome website by a NYC film scout - he finds the most amazing places!)
• Maps of Palisades Parkway
• La Lupe (Cuban singer)
• Blood Donation and replenishment
• Brust Park
• Tastee Kake
• Trojan Horse
• Spanish name origins
• What's in a knish?
• Colleges near Bronx
• wax melting temperature
• metal melting temperature
• HS AP English syllabus

3)Crutch Words
Oh Lordy. When you are drafting, you've got your voice flowing, you're ducking and diving you're in the zone - it's awesome. Then you come up for air and realize you use some phrases and words too much. These words are repetitive and can echo in the reader's mind - in a bad way, pulling them up short. When I use lazy crutch words it's because I'm in the zone and I'm too rushed to be thoughtful, so I grab at a word I use a lot, one I like and am comfortable with. Comfy words are fine and make up a writer's voice, but DON'T GET LAZY! Some words are used really really a lot in real life (like 'really') so it's not quite so egregious to use those often. But for me, so far, some of my crutch words are pristine, probably, paste a smile, and whatever. There will be more that I don't catch. I'm trusting my beta readers to stop me from using lazy words.

4) Beats
As in dialogue beats. I am usually pretty good when writing dialogue, I tend to include beats - moments around the dialogue that ground the reader in the action and location of the characters speaking. This is so you don't finish reading a section of dialogue and have no mental image of where the characters are or what they are doing. People don't (unless they are stoned or robots) usually walk into a room, stand in front of each other and talk until they are done. They fidget, they pick things up (and put them down.) They interact with their space. I want to make sure I don't inadvertently turn my MC into a robot or a stoner.

And that's it. On friday FIND ME will go out to beta readers and I will forget it exists (HA!) for a month. Then in March I'll take it out of it's virtual marinating drawer, compare notes from beta readers and polish the EFF out of it. Then I'll send it to Barbara while swilling a new cocktail of my own creation called the Nervous Nellie (recipe to come.)

What do you do to get ready for Beta Readers?