Saturday 24 April 2010

beautiful imperfection

I hated making revisions to THE INFERNAL FAMILY. Every mistake I found was another sign that I was a bad writer. If I was any good at this I would have written a better draft in the first place.

Now that I’m revising IRONBANE, I find I’m mellowing out. If I’m making changes, it’s not because I should have done better the first time around. It just means I’ve learned something: I see now what I couldn’t see then. Mistakes are just opportunities.

(Sparked by the realisation that when your two antagonists have one plot role, one master plan and one compelling motivation-providing backstory between them, you probably only have one antagonist.)

What about you? How do you feel during revisions?

3 comments:

  1. I hate revisions. In fact, I've never finished revising a novel before. Right now I'm re-planning and going to rewrite from scratch because my problems are too large scale and abundant.

    I don't mind revising short stories so much, but novels... don't get me started. That's why why Holly Lisle's method is so appealing to me, so thanks for linking to that earlier. How did that go for you by the way?

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  2. I love revising. It's my favorite part of writing. Until then, I'm just clearing my cache. Once I have a draft I can really start to work.

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  3. I'm really, really looking forward to the revision stage of EMPIRE OF LIGHT (but then again you already know that ;)) I'm probably getting my hopes up on this draft, but once I'm done with it, I really hope to have something that does NOT need to be rewritten from scratch for once and that I can really whip into shape applying all those new things I learned during and after writing it. So I guess I'm seconding your newfound approach to revisions - it's a good one :)

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