The joys (horrors) of revising ...

Lockdowns are hard and it's fair to say my creativity has taken a wee bit of a hammering over this time. I've kept writing - mostly reviews, blogposts, manuscript assessments and reports but from time to time I've managed a smidge of something a little more creative - while major projects have been sitting this one out I've produced a couple of grown up poems here and there, and done some picture book revising. I've kept submitting things beause this is still possible. And I've had some good news things happening too. 

One of these good news things was seeing three of my books in the Storylines Notable Book Awards. Sharing with Wolf illustrated by Nikki Slade Robinson (Scholastic), My Elephant is Blue, illustrated by Vasanti Unka (Puffin [PenguinRH]) and Ko PekaKiwi, illustrated by Isobel Joy Te Aho-White and translated by Pānia Papa. BatKiwi also got a mention - highly commended in the Picture Book Category. I'm very proud of these books and it is a real thrill to have them recognised this way. You can check out the whole glorious list here. Lots of wonderful books across 5 categories, perfect for Christmas gifts for the young people in your lives. 

Recently an article was published in New Zealand with authors talking about what they were doing in lockdown and a bunch of us agreed this would be a cool thing to do with children's authors and illustrators as well. You can check out what we said here. 

I also thought I'd share this lovely treatise by author Eirlys Hunter on how a little fantasy can end up bringing the real world closer, and how the distance between the two is surprisingly small and the barrier extremely porous for young readers. 

And in the best kind of surprise twist I didn't see coming, I've had another picture book accepted for publication. This one, titled Sun Shower, is to be published by Scholastic NZ. They've also said a tentative yes to another manuscript pending revision. This sort of thing can be thrilling and terrifying in near equal measure. Revising on your own time, for your own purposes is, while sometimes hard, a generally positive experience. You are working to please yourself at a pace of your own choosing. And there is no pressure on the end result, especially in comparison to the original manuscript. Mucked it up? No matter. Try again, or toss it in the bin, the bottom drawer, or bury it six feet under. No one need ever know. We need not ever speak of it again. But a requested revision can be a different beast entirely. Someone is waiting, they know my starting point, and they will be judging my efforts at improvement. It is a nice problem to have but I will be sweating buckets. 

I'll be keeping an original version safe so I can retreat to it if things go awry. I'll be scrutinising the original and asking what its strengths are so I don't lose those along the way. And I'll be trusting my gut as it has served me well in the past. And I am also working on a completely different story in case this one bursts into flames and is reduced to a pile of ash and I need to cheer myself up with a new submission.  

When someone should slap your hand away from the keyboard...

Writing is not always about writing. Sometimes it is:

dreaming
imagining
re-imagining
fiddling around with unrelated stuff to unblock the drains on your brain
refreshing - the mind
                 - your email
being stuck
researching help/publishers/agents
preparing queries/submissions/synopses

But it's not called 'writing' for nothing, so a big part of what we do is getting the words down and arranging them into a coherent and fresh assemblage that we hope will win readers over. We create the story and then move on to the second and third tiers of writing:

revising
editing
titivating
second guessing yourself


Revising, editing and titivating are related, but are not the same thing. Revising is clocking rubbish sentences, it's thinking 'no, I can't kill Mrs Kilgour in Chapter 3 after all cos she's the only one who can slip the note under the door in Chapter 7'. Mrs Kilgour's demise must therefore be moved to Chapter 8. It's activating passive sentences and changing that eleventh 'ambled' into a fresher synonym, killing darlings that just don't belong no matter how hard you ply the shoe horn and fighting cliches tooth and nail. Its moving action around and making the narrative more sensible and the language and sentence structure stronger. It's taking out the obvious 'writing' so the reader won't notice the seams, or the authorial hand if you like. It's what you do before you send your MS out to a publisher or consider it ready for self pubbing.

Editing comes after you feel the MS is done. It is essential and, I always think, best done by another eye. It's grammar and punctuation appraisal and correction. And it's 'Mrs Kilgour really should be gone by Chapter 4, unless you give her more to do between then and Chapter 8. Or maybe just find another stooge to slip the note, or send a text or pigeon post instead.' It's a fresh reader saying 'I don't get why this is happening,' or 'no one talks like that these days' or 'that eye colour change better be the result of new contact lenses but you might want to mention that in the text.' You can't be the objective reader. No, really, you can't. You can be for revising, but not for editing. Trust me on this.

And then there is titivating: the final spruce up that may or may not be necessary. It can easily become a delaying tactic, more a manifestation of the fear of taking the next step than it is a means to improving your work. And titivating is a distant relation and sometimes a precursor to second guessing and if you have reached this point, someone should probably just slap your hand away from the paper or the keyboard. Second guessing is related to self doubt, and is just as useless. It's wondering and fixating on what will make the publisher accept my story, the purchaser pick my book, the reader love it and review it, the judges select it as a finalist etc...that I haven't already included. It sometimes comes before you finally send your story out, and sometimes it happens after a few rejections or indifferent reviews. And the bottom line is you can't know. Your best guide is you. Tell the story the way you want to. Read it and see if it moves you, makes you laugh or cry, or both. Sometimes, and I'm sorry but this is an unpleasant truth, your story might actually be perfect and still not find a home, with publishers or purchasers or readers. A semi-proof of the pointlessness of second guessing is that while 5 publishers may reject your work, the 6th (or 26th) one may love it and can't wait to put it on shop shelves. If you had tried to please the second five by second guessing your work and altering it based on supposition about why the first five didn't accept it, it might no longer be the story you had so much faith in, and loved. And it might not catch the eye of any of the publishers, be they the sixth or the nth one because it is no longer the work of your heart and possibly has even started to show signs of being overworked.  Of course, if twenty publishers or 20 members of your critique group (okay most groups aren't that big but I'm just trying to make a point here so bear with me) all point to the same problem then you revise. But trying to fix a story that isn't broken is fruitless. Second guessing can give you no greater guarantees of success and quite possibly might just tie you in knots.

So to sum up, revision is good, editing is best outsourced, titivating is procrastinating and second guessing is the path to madness. Let's be careful out there people.

Jack Sequel and the Writer's Tool-kit...

I'm at that point in my WIP when I am a third of the way through writing the first draft and I can't believe I will ever finish this sucker. I've finished novels before and I know I will most likely finish this one too but its hard to imagine right now. Its like knitting a fancy sweater with three cables across the front where the chance of dropping a stitch is high. Can I bring all the threads of the story together in a satisfying way? That is the plan and I just need to keep at it.

I do not go through a lot of drafts, finishing the story first and then revising again and again. I tend to fix as I go which probably goes part of the way to explaining why I am a little slower at writing compared with some of my peers. So at least when I do make it to the end I will not have a long period of rewriting ahead (unless some prospective publisher demands it). Having said that, my last novel (the sequel to Jack the Viking) took a looooonnngg time to write because twice before i'd even got to the end of the story I ripped out a decent chunk of words and started again from about a quarter of the way in (first 10,000 words, the second time around 20,000). Then when it was complete I did the edit on the first novel which meant more changes to the sequel. This may have cured me of writing series, trilogies or sequels ever again. I would be more inclined to write them if the story came to me as a two- or three-parter in the first place. Still, i would never say never to anything cos thats just silly. I does not like to eat my words, especially that 'never' word - it is not tasty. It was also comforting to know I could look criticly enough at my own work to see when it was going wrong (with a little help from a friend at one point) and to be able to fix it. These are important tools in the tool kit of the writer and I'm thrilled i've been able to add them to mine.