Hi, squiders. Sorry for the long time, no see–I was on a trip, and normally I schedule posts for when I’m gone, but it just didn’t happen this time around.
(The trip also had a surprisingly little amount of downtime, despite planning whole swathes of time for that. I only read half a book–mostly on the airplanes, actually–wrote a single sentence in my writing journal, and read over an outline for a novella and then did nothing else.)
Oh, and last call for name suggestions for my new writing friend! I hope to dub him later this week.
Anyway, here’s the WriYe prompt for the month. Like most Marchs, in homage to the now defunct NaNoEdMo, it revolves around editing and revision.
March: Revision or New Vision? Revising vs Re-Writing? Which one is it?
I am firmly of the belief that if you can finish a story, in general it is working. It’s been my experience that if a story is broken, you eventually reach a place where you can no longer go forward.
That being said, a story can still have a lot of faults even if you manage a finished draft.
So for revision or new vision, I go revision. (Unless, of course, I’m trying to fix a story that I couldn’t complete a draft on the first time through.) You can do a lot of changing and deepening without affecting the core of what the story is about.
For revising or re-writing, well, I think you have to do both. Well, I do both. I always always always plan out my revisions before I do them. It goes so much easier if I can see what needs to change where and know what is changing to what else.
But I rewrite. Some people just go in and change the specific passages that are changing. I can do that–and have, for tighter deadlines–but I don’t like to. I like to start at the beginning and rewrite everything, in order, whether I’m changing the passage or not. I make my changes as I go, but I also re-type parts that aren’t changing rather than copying and pasting them.
This is a little OCD of me, I am aware, but I find this does a couple of things. 1) It ensures a consistency in voice and tone. Your writing voice changes over time, and especially for larger projects or projects I haven’t touched in a while, sometimes it can be obvious you wrote different parts at different times.
2) It helps me keep track of everything to make sure I’m not leaving things out.
3) It allows me to tweak little things, such as removing filtering or improving flow.
Is this slower? Oh, absolutely. But I find the quality of what I get out of doing it this way is much higher, and much more consistent, so we continue on.
Thoughts, squiders? Turtle names?
