{"id":545,"date":"2009-04-20T00:27:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T07:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=545"},"modified":"2009-04-20T00:29:29","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T07:29:29","slug":"revision-revision-revision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/revision-revision-revision\/","title":{"rendered":"Revision, revision, revision"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finished revising chapter 6 of Genesis Earth<\/em> today. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d expected. Even though I’d revised half the chapter yesterday, I started from the beginning and changed a lot of the other revisions I’d made. I think this version is stronger, but I’m not sure how it’ll fit in with the other chapters.<\/p>\n

The thing about revising is that if you change something fundamental about the character \/ setting \/ plot early on, it changes everything that happens later, meaning that you have even more revisions to make. It’s like ripples on a pond, or switching tracks at a railroad junction hundreds of miles before your destination. Right now, a lot of the changes I decided to make earlier are making much larger changes necessary later on. That’s one reason why this chapter took so long to revise.<\/p>\n

Another reason is because I felt I’d told it wrong the first time. A lot of my alpha readers said that my novel was weakest on conflict; they didn’t feel that it had enough conflict to carry them through the longer parts in the middle. I realized, when I reread it, that the conflict was mostly there, it just wasn’t emphasized properly.<\/p>\n

A lot of these revisions had to do with connecting the events better, starting late and exiting early, creating more of a build up to the climax. They also involved changing the order in which I explained certain things–it created more tension to bring up certain things earlier, before the action. Tension and release.<\/p>\n

I think I failed to do all that in the rough draft because I’m more of what Sanderson calls a “discovery writer.” The middle sections are always the hardest for me, because I have to figure things out as I go along. I’ve tried planning everything out from the beginning, but when I did that, the story that came out was completely different than what I’d planned.<\/p>\n

Trouble is, if I’m discovering my story as I’m going along, the middle sections are going to be much more choppy and rough. I can write a pretty good beginning, and I think I can pull off a decent ending, but the stuff in the middle is just all over the place, every time I write.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, I think the revision process is going well. It takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s producing results. I think chapter 6 works much better now, though it could probably use a little more tweaking just to fit it into the context of the story as a whole. Better finish the 2.0 revision before I do that, though.<\/p>\n

For a while, I thought that with school out and all this free time on my hands before I really go anywhere, I could finish the 2.0 revision before the end of the week. Now, I’m thinking it will probably take more time. I could probably be about 75% done by the end of the week, though. Even with all these deep revisions, I’m plugging along at a healthy pace. And honestly, this is the kind of work I enjoy. It’s a challenge, but not an unpleasant one at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished revising chapter 6 of Genesis Earth today. It took a lot more time and effort than I’d expected. Even though I’d revised half the chapter yesterday, I started from the beginning and changed a lot of the other revisions I’d made. I think this version is stronger, but I’m not sure how it’ll… Continue reading Revision, revision, revision<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32],"tags":[185,78,193,192,158,8,73,156,194,599],"class_list":["post-545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ge","tag-action","tag-brandon-sanderson","tag-conflict","tag-discovery-writing","tag-first-readers","tag-writing-in-general","tag-planning","tag-revising","tag-suspense","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-8N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":548,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}