Liz Fielding talks about Revisions and how she tackles them. She has a new book out this month, Murder in the Vineyard.
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There are two kinds of writers. The kind who quickly throw down a dirty draft and then,
when they have the bones of the story, go back and fill in the blanks, sometimes taking
several drafts to get to the finished article. At that point they’ll send it to their editor and
will almost certainly get a page or two of construction suggestions to improve the book.
There may be a certain amount of moaning in the privacy of their own writing space at
this point, but then they get on with it.
Then there are writers like me, who work slowly, revising as they go. When something
happens later in the book that requires a change earlier on, I have go back and fix that or
my brain won’t settle. If I can’t find the perfect word I will sometimes leave a row of x’s
but it will niggle at me until I’ve found it.
This makes me a much slower writer than some of my friends, but it’s my process and it
does mean that when I get to the end of a book, apart from a final read through, it’s ready
to go to my editor.
But of course that’s only the beginning of the next process of turning the ms into a book.
Because when you read something you’re familiar with — oh, so familiar! — you read
what you expect to see. Your eyes skim over the repetitions, continuity errors, the missed
words, the misspellings and the plain old typos. As I’ve got older my perfect 75 wph
typing is not what it was when I was 20 and, to be honest, the digital keyboard has made
us all a lot more careless than back in the day when we were using a typewriter with 5
carbon copies.
And even writing this way my first draft is not going to be the final version because, as
I said, you read what you expect to see. Some of find sending the doc to our eReader at
this point. Reading it like a book, in this way, shows up the glaring errors much more
clearly.
This first read is to find the typos, the missed words, the spelling mistakes, the extra
spaces, all the stuff that will make your ms look professional. You won’t catch them all.
Even really good copy editors miss some. One experienced writer friend advises reading
the ms backwards. I have never gone that far.
The next thing to do is read each scene carefully and ask yourself, if it deserves its place?
Is it serving the story or is it padding? Can you say in sentence what you’ve written in a
paragraph?
Have you overdone the adjectives? Is the pace appropriate? Is the scene slow and
sensuous or fast and snappy? Your word choices and sentence length will be different.
Have you repeated yourself? It happens, especially when you’re writing fast. I recently
spotted somewhere I’d done that in my latest ms.
Maybe, at this point ask someone you trust to read it. Not family – unless they’re going to
be brutally — but helpfully—honest . You’re not looking for praise, you’re looking for
useful
feedback so it has to be someone who will spot any weakness, any point that isn’t
absolutely clear. Oh, and all the typos you’ve missed.
You do not want your reader to have to stop to figure something out. A friend pointed out
exactly that in a recent novella I wrote for an anthology we’re working on together and I
am very grateful. Writing more than 80 books is no protection against any of these flaws.
And, when you’ve done all that, the best advice is to put the ms aside for as long as you
can bear. A month is good, but at least a week or two. I know. I’s hard. You want to get it
out there. But it’s really worth the wait.
You’ll return to it with a little distance, fresh eyes and you will be able to tighten it up
even more.
Good luck!
Liz Fielding has a new book out:
Murder in the Vineyard
It’s a golden summer’s day in the Cotswolds. And garden designer Abby Finch is about to uncork the perfect murder . . .
Huge-hearted Abby loves dogs — and doesn’t think twice about swerving to avoid an adorable terrier in a country lane. Or following along, when the troublesome pup goes darting off into a local vineyard.
But she never expects where the runaway dog is leading her — straight to a corpse!
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Clementine Courtenay, elegant matriarch of the May Valley Vineyard, lies floating face-down in a stream.
The police say she must have slipped and drowned. But Abby’s not so sure.
As rumours begin to swirl amid the tangled vines, Abby realizes that no one in Clementine’s inner circle is quite what they seem.
Between jilted lovers, greedy offspring and bitter rivals, Clementine kept her friends close and her enemies closer still . . .
What secrets will Abby find — fermenting in the darkest corners of the Courtenay family cellar?
It’s up to Abby to solve the case before this sweetest vintage turns sour . . .
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