A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

Occasionally as I'm drifting off to sleep at night, I jolt awake thinking, "Did I fact-check that?" I always tell myself to stop thinking about it and go to sleep instead of getting up to do research, which invariably means that I lie awake worrying for longer than it would have taken to look it up.

A lot of facts go into a work of fiction. My novel takes place in the real United States in particular real cities at specific times. The basic rules of reality apply to the characters -- that is, my book doesn't involve magic, supernatural elements, warps in the fabric of time-space, or anything like that.

Into this real world setting, I'm putting fictional people and giving them a whole lot of fictional accessories: houses that don't exist, imaginary businesses, made-up books. Part of getting the reader to go along with the fiction is to make sure that wherever it touches the real world, it's consistent with what the reader knows.

For a blatant example, if the characters are all carrying cell phones in 1995 (or even more blatantly, in 1965), the reader is going to notice that inconsistency with the real known world. An unjustified anachronism like that isn't part of the fictional overlay of the story, it's an error. The reader will be at least distracted and perhaps moved to throw the book across the room and never pick it up again, depending on their tolerance level. I want to avoid that.

The actual examples are subtler, of course, but the problem is the same. What kept me awake last night was wondering if it's really reasonable to drive from the Grand Canyon to San Jose in one day. This occurs in the chapter I'm revising, and I supposed that I must have researched it when writing the previous draft, but I started to question whether it was realistic.

Some readers (of this post and eventually of the novel) will be familiar with the distance and recognize if I've made a factual error. More readers will be like me -- they haven't made the drive and have only a vague sense of the geography -- so they might accept whatever I present as truth, but they might just as well question it like I did. This is clearly a detail that I need to get right, and it's one of my easier research problems.

Google Maps puts the drive at twelve to thirteen hours. Okay, that's an achievable single long day of driving, but the story introduces additional factors. The characters are traveling in 1963, before the completion of the interstate highway system, so they might be on slower roads. If I needed to judge the driving time more precisely, I'd do more extensive research on the highways, but I can already rule out a one-day drive due to the other complication: the characters include two five-year-olds. A family with small children isn't going to willingly make that drive in a single day.

I'm a bit irritated with Past Me for writing the chapter this way so that now I have to change it, but it turns out it won't create a huge amount of upheaval to adjust the scenario. I even have a change in mind that might make the story better.

This isn't the first time I've found that needing to accommodate the constraints of the real world results in a solution that improves the story. I've encountered other writers talking about this phenomenon, too. It's pretty cool when it happens.

All of this brings up the issue of when in the writing process to do research. It's easy to put a ton of time into research before or during a first draft and then discover in revision that many of the researched elements are no longer needed. For that reason, it can be better to save detailed research until later, when you know what's staying in the story. But then you run into situations like this where you've written a factual error into the events of the plot, and the fix is more complicated than changing a few words. Though as I said, these fixes can lead to good improvements. So I don't have a good answer about when to do research, except that you should definitely not get so caught up in research that you avoid writing altogether.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Kathryn Schulz describes her night owl habits in an essay on Writing in the Dark: "Mostly, though, I stay up to write. I started doing so in earnest in college, when almost everyone stays up to write--to the dismay of the remaining few, a.k.a. the roommates. Half my memories of those years are bathed in the blue glow of a computer, illuminating an otherwise dark room."

Running the Numbers

This week, in honor of completing the revision of my second storyline (yay again!), I've been taking stock of the manuscript and my process. I already told you how I did the math and discovered the second story is longer than I expected. I also created a spreadsheet to calculate how much time I've spent revising. (Do I know how to celebrate or what?)

The numbers revealed several interesting facts -- some discouraging, some reassuring, and some surprising:

→ Counting the number of weeks elapsed, it took exactly the same amount of time to revise the first and second storylines. I had no idea this was the case.

→ After excluding the weeks I didn't work at all due to vacation or other factors, I spent six more weeks with the second storyline. This was upsetting until I realized how much longer the text is.

→ Since I spend a widely varying amount of time writing each week, the number of hours worked gives a more accurate picture of how long each revision took. The hour total for the second storyline is larger than for the first, and that makes sense given the story is longer. I had hoped my calculations would confirm my predictions and show that relative to the length, the second storyline went faster than the first. Alas, looking at words per hour, it would appear that my progress through the second storyline was about ten percent slower. You may all share a hearty laugh.

→ Back in December, I looked over my record of hours worked up to that point, and I was disheartened to see how little overall time I'd spent writing compared to the number of weeks elapsed. I had hoped my latest accounting would show that as a result of that wake-up call, I'd worked many more hours per week throughout the second storyline. The average number of hours is indeed higher, but not as much as I anticipated, and that's even excluding the weeks I took off. I'm still working fewer hours most weeks than seems reasonable to me. I guess it's time for a louder wake-up call.

After considering all these numbers, I have a new plan to make sure I'm happier with my stats for the final storyline. But we all know what happens to plans.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Millions, Bill Morris catalogs The Appeals and Perils of the One-Word Book Title: "At their best, one-word titles distill content to its purest essence, which is what all titles strive to do, and then they stick in the mind. Sometimes, of course, they fall flat, and much of the time they're just lukewarm and vague or, worse, falsely grand."

It's How You Use It

If you're familiar with National Novel Writing Month, you'll know that the event revolves around word count and that the goal is to write a novel of 50,000 words. You may also be aware that 50,000 words is much shorter than most novels published for adults these days. The type of book I'm writing could be twice that, or more. (Speaking very, very roughly, a published book has around 300 words per page.)

Since the beginning, I've been expecting this novel to be on the long side -- and no, for those of you out there snickering, it's not because I have an embarrassing history of producing ridiculously lengthy manuscripts. THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE contains three distinct stories, so it needs a good amount of space for all the plots to unfold. I've put a lot of attention into deciding what belongs on the page and what doesn't, and at this point I feel confident that the book will be the correct length to tell the story, with no excess.

I wrote the first draft of DAMAGE during NaNoWriMo in 2007, so I was keeping careful track of the word count. It came in around 80,000 words, and I was pleased to know that I'd have plenty of room to add more to the story. When I wrote the second draft from scratch two years later, I also kept track of my daily word count (though I'd forgotten about that until I found the spreadsheet today). The second version of the book was 110,000 words, a size that seemed appropriate for the story, with even a some leeway to expand.

During this revision, I haven't focused much on word count. I'm rewriting within an existing document, doing a combination of adding new material and removing old text, so tracking words is a less useful metric. Instead, I've been keeping track of hours worked. I've also been thinking about the number of pages in each chapter and noticing the page count that's always visible at the bottom of the window.

Obviously, there's a relationship between page count and word count. They increase and decrease together, and you can estimate one from the other. But I hadn't been making those estimates, and I hadn't been running the word count feature. And more importantly, I wasn't doing any of the math about how many of the pages in the document (which contains all the novel's chapters) had been added in the course of working on this storyline.

So I was surprised when I finished the second storyline (yay!) and discovered that it's significantly longer than the first one I revised. This isn't a disaster, and I was aware that the second plot was turning out larger than planned, but the actual numbers were unexpected.

See, the story that takes place chronologically last, which is the one I revised first (sorry, this is complicated), serves as a sort of frame for the other two storylines. For structural reasons, the frame story has more chapters than the other two. I also intended to add the most new material to the frame (it's really more than a frame) while keeping the other two plots fairly stable. Therefore, I concluded that the frame would be longer than the other two.

When I revised that first storyline, the chapters tended toward a consistent length. I started the second storyline and was a bit alarmed to find that the chapters were all turning out longer. I decided that was fine, and I guessed that as a result, the two stories might be about the same size. At no point did I do any actual math on this to see how far off my guess was. In hindsight, the page and chapter discrepancies clearly meant I was creating far more words and pages for the second story.

As I said, this is not a disaster, and I'm continuing to stand behind the length of the manuscript. The third storyline will have the same number of chapters as the second and is supposed to be around the same length -- but I guess we'll see how it goes.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Theresa Stevens at Edittorrent talks about how to build complexity into texts without undercutting the integrity of the story: "complexity is built up in small moments, but each of those moments must be clear in and of themselves. If the contradictions in your narrative aren't presented in a clear way, in a way that allows the reader to easily grasp them, then you're not building complexity into the text."

May Reading Plan

Here's what I have stacked up to read next:

→ GATHERING OF WATERS by Bernice L. McFadden - I didn't get to this book in April, but now I've started reading it, and the opening is intriguing. The story is set in Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was murdered. However, it begins long before then, with some earlier inhabitants of the town. I'm looking forward to seeing how the tale unfolds.

→ SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY by Mary Robinette Kowal - The author is one of the hosts of the excellent podcast Writing Excuses, and in addition to being a writer, she's a puppeteer. (This has nothing to do with the novel, but is awesome.) SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY adopts the style and society of Jane Austen's novels and places them in a world that contains magic. Since I recently read and enjoyed my first Austen, I've been curious to read this book.

→ GONE, GONE, GONE by Hannah Moskowitz - This young adult novel was released a couple of weeks ago, and Hannah posted about why the book is so important to her. It takes place in the Washington DC area during the 2002 sniper attacks. I previously read and was impressed by Hannah's INVINCIBLE SUMMER.

→ THE LEGEND OF PRADEEP MATHEW by Shehan Karunatilaka - This upcoming release is the next pick for the Bookrageous book club. I know it has something to do with cricket, and this piqued my interest because despite my expectations, I really liked another novel about cricket, NETHERLAND by Joseph O'Neill.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Edan Lepucki reports for The Millions on her experience giving away books on World Book Night: "Others eyed me and the baby skeptically, as if trying to discern if we were members of a religious cult. One guy thought I was offering him a book I had written -- and it was clear he did not want that. I found myself exclaiming, 'This won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago!' -- and I was heartened to see that the phrase made a difference."

April Reading Recap

This month I read three of the four books on my reading list:

→ HOUSE OF DOORS by Chaz Brenchley - As I mentioned, Chaz is an acquaintance, but I believe my recommendation of this book is based only on how excellent is. The writing style and the main character drew me in immediately, and I was reminded once again that I shouldn't avoid books based on my preconceptions about their genres.

Ruth is a nurse working in London during World War II. Her husband was recently killed in action, and Ruth would like to be transferred to the front in the hopes that a stray bullet might end her life as well. Instead, she's sent to a large estate in the English countryside that's housing a military hospital with a mysterious purpose. While Ruth tries to understand what she's doing there, she finds herself haunted even more strongly than before by thoughts of her husband and his fiery death.

HOUSE OF DOORS is a horror story, so the haunting eventually becomes more literal and horrific. But if you're like me and wouldn't normally read horror, don't let that stop you from picking up this book. I was interested to realize how few pages were devoted to supernatural occurrences, even though these events end up driving the plot. This novel is suspenseful and creepy, but it primarily reads like a work of carefully researched historical fiction in which some strange things happen.

Ruth is a great, complex character who is struggling with a variety of internal conflicts. She's highly adept at reading people and situations, sometimes with an almost Sherlock Holmes level of insight, but she's far from perfect. Ruth is very conscious of etiquette and appearances, and her behavior seems very of the time, but she's full of surprises, too. I was glad to have her as my companion through this unnerving HOUSE OF DOORS.

→ THE GILLY SALT SISTERS by Tiffany Baker - Jo and Claire Gilly grew up farming a Cape Cod salt marsh that has belonged to their family for generations. Harvesting sea salt is hard work that doesn't pay off as well as it used to. After a series of tragedies, Claire abandons the salt marsh to marry the richest man in town, while Jo stubbornly continues the family business alone despite encroaching financial realities. The story moves through past and present to reveal the dark secrets of the Gillys and how their fate is tied up with the town's most established family and with the life of a young newcomer.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to. Stories about families and secrets generally appeal to me, but I found this one uneven and not especially compelling. I preferred Baker's first novel, THE LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY, a more successful tale of sisters, outsiders, secrets, and love.

→ THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC by Julie Otsuka - This novella follows a group of Japanese women who arrive in San Francisco as "picture brides" for earlier immigrants whom they have never met. The women find that their new husbands are farmers and laborers, rather than the successful businessmen they claimed to be in their letters, but they make the best of their new American lives, work hard in the fields and laundries of California, and raise children who understand the language and culture better than they ever will. When Pearl Harbor is attacked, they suffer humiliating persecution and are sent away to internment camps.

The best way to explain the unusual style of the narrative is with an excerpt:

We gave birth under oak trees, in summer, in 113-degree heat. We gave birth beside woodstoves in one-room shacks on the coldest nights of the year. We gave birth on windy islands in the Delta, six months after we arrived, and the babies were tiny, and translucent, and after three days they died. We gave birth nine months after we arrived to perfect babies with full heads of black hair. We gave birth in dusty vineyard camps in Elk Grove and Florin. We gave birth on remote farms in the Imperial Valley with the help of only our husbands, who had learned from The Housewife's Companion what to do. First you bring the pan water to a boil...

Not all the sentences have the same structure, though there are long stretches when they do, but the entire book is these lists of different experiences. No individual characters emerge, and there isn't much more of a plot than the summary I presented. It's a story composed entirely of details and emotion. The style probably couldn't be sustained for a longer work, but for 129 rather small pages, it works.

I found BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC very moving. It's sad and beautiful and effective, and I recommend it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Colin Nissan offers The Ultimate Guide To Writing Better Than You Normally Do: "Don't Procrastinate: Procrastination is an alluring siren taunting you to Google the country where Balki from Perfect Strangers was from, and to arrange sticky notes on your dog in the shape of hilarious dog shorts. A wicked temptress beckoning you to watch your children, and take showers. Well, it’s time to look procrastination in the eye and tell that seafaring wench, 'Sorry not today, today I write.'" (Thanks, Louise!)

I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

Earlier this week I posted about the kind of outlining and notetaking that I'm using for this revision. The short version: To deal with the complex three-in-one structure of my novel, I've had to spend an awful lot of time keeping track of the story.

For this third major draft of the manuscript, I worked hard to plan all the big things in advance. But despite the extensive planning, I still periodically encounter gaping holes where I failed to map out the logic behind a required scene. These holes are particularly extensive near the end of each storyline.

As an example, say my outline indicates that in this chapter the narrator confronts his mother and father, separately, about the big family secret he's learned about from his sister. And that in the course of these conversations, he arrives at all the necessary realizations and decisions that will allow him to choose the actions that come next in the plot. Oh, and also that there should be some plausible reason for the topic to come up in this scene after everyone's avoided talking about it for so long.

Well, when I get to this point in the outline, I might be lucky enough to discover that Past Me left some suggestions about how to accomplish all this. But Past Me was a less experienced writer than Present Me, so the suggestions are likely to be pretty weak. And that doesn't matter anyway, because the earlier parts of the story have deviated so far from the outline that the suggestions no longer make any sense.

So then I worry that I may not be able to believably bring about the scenes and realizations needed for the plot to conclude the way it's supposed to. And I panic for a while and stop working and decide to give up writing and become a goatherd. Or maybe a dolphin trainer.

But I eventually convince myself to keep going. And somehow I write the necessary scenes in a way that makes far more sense than I planned, with far more important insights for the characters plus a bunch of exciting new connections for the reader to appreciate. It's perfect! It's brilliant! It might turn out to be horribly forced when I share it with anyone else, but for now, I'll continue deluding myself!

The storyline that remains to be revised is absolutely full of holes, and I intend to give the outline some more attention before I get started. I'm sure I still won't manage to figure it all out in advance. But I'm going to continue hanging on to the hope that ultimately, I'll manage to cram all the pieces of this puzzle together.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Tim Parks writes for the New York Review of Books blog in defense of ebooks: "...are these old habits essential? Mightn't they actually be distracting us from the written word itself? Weren’t there perhaps specific pleasures when reading on parchment scroll that we know nothing of and have lived happily without?" (Thanks, The Millions!)

Bookkeeping

Because my novel has interlocking storylines about the same family in three different time periods, part of the fun for the reader is learning more than the characters about what has happened or will happen. By "fun," I mean "horror and frustration," as in "I can't believe he thinks that's okay when it's going to screw up his son for life!" and "Sure, it's nice that they're finally opening up to each other, but they're still not telling each other the whole truth!"

This aspect of the story is certainly the most fun for me as a writer. And by "fun," I mean "fun, plus a huge pain in the ass." Every draft has introduced exponentially more connections and parallels and misunderstandings to make readers tear their hair out. That's a great thing, but it's been a lot of work to assemble and keep track of.

Last week Christopher Gronlund posted about outlines and why he doesn't use them. I've tried writing both with and without an outline and had some success with both strategies. For the first draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, I started out with very simple notes consisting of one line for each chapter that listed the main events. With each revision, my notes have become more complex.

To approach this draft, I created a color-coded paper chart in an attempt to visualize all the knowledge possessed by each character and the reader at different points in the story. I never quite succeeded in capturing all the information I wanted to, but in the course of developing the chart, I made some important realizations about improvements for the story, so the effort was worth it.

I eventually incorporated all of my notes into SuperNotecard, and I've continued to be happy with this software. The cards and decks I've set up in SuperNotecard serve as an outline of the plot, a chronicle of what the characters know and don't know, a record of research done and still needed, and more.

For me, an outline isn't something I create at the beginning and then follow to the letter. So many ideas emerge as I write that the story is constantly veering off in other directions, and often these new paths are better than the ones I'd mapped out in advance. But I still like having an outline that reflects the novel, especially for this book, where I frequently find it easier to reference my notes for the other storylines rather than hunting for things in the text.

So part of my revision process involves bookkeeping. Once or twice a chapter, I review what I've ended up writing and make the appropriate changes to my notes. It's a useful step, because in addition to giving me an accurate record, the bookkeeping tends to spark extra ideas for upcoming chapters. But it's tedious work, and I often dread doing it, especially if I've made major changes or haven't updated my notes in a while. On the other hand, the bookkeeping also serves as a not-quite-procrastination method that can ease me into writing when I'm not in the mood.

Sometimes I think I'd like to write a simpler novel next time. But what would be the fun in that?

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Betsy Morais reports for The Atlantic on the future of book covers in the age of ebooks: "A digital book has no cover. There's no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon's postage stamp-sized pictures, which don't actually cover anything..." (Thanks, Lilly Tao!)

What Now?

Now that I've finally finished explaining what's involved in revision, you might be wondering what's still ahead in the process.

The first step is that I have to complete the great big stage I'm currently in. Right now I'm nearly done with the second storyline. It's quite possible I said the same thing a month or so ago. The final few chapters of this story have been a real doozy. But soon enough, I'll be concluding this plot.

Then I'll move on to the chapters narrated by the last, but chronologically earliest, protagonist. I hope to once again benefit from the injection of enthusiasm that comes from beginning something different, even if it's still part of the same novel. Revising the final storyline will take a certain number of months. I'll commit to that much of a time estimate.

At that point I'm sure that all the wonderful people who have volunteered to read the manuscript will be clamoring for a copy, so I want to warn you now that it's not going to be ready the moment I complete the last chapter. In the course of this revision, I've made some adjustments that created inconsistencies with bits I'd already worked on, so I'm going to have to go back and fix up those problems before sharing the draft with anyone. Just want to be clear on that in advance.

Writing out a description of my whole revision process has helped me realize that, hey, yeah, this is a big project, and I'm feeling a little less impatient now. I hope my eager future readers feel the same.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Intern demystifies the glamorous road to publication and explains why you will still be insane after the book deal: "If your forthcoming novel has a scene in which the characters go skinny dipping in a hail storm, you will immediately stumble upon twenty already-published novels with a scene in which characters skinny dip in a hail storm."

What Is a Revision?

Today we finally get around to the real answer to the question I imagine lies behind all kind inquiries about my writing: "Lisa, what do you mean when you say you're revising?"

Revision is the process of taking a completed (in the sense of containing a beginning, middle, and end) manuscript, subjecting it to real scrutiny (help from critique partners is recommended for this step), and then making changes (often drastic changes) to improve the story. These changes are likely to include some of the following: making the plot or characters more believable, improving the pacing, removing unnecessary or repetitive scenes, raising the stakes, aligning subplots with the main plot, adding characterization to major or minor characters, fixing continuity errors, adding or removing backstory, adding or removing description, adding or removing clever literary devices such as themes and motifs.

As you might imagine, these kinds of changes take a lot of work, and that's on top of the work of writing a novel in the first place. It would be nice to get all the elements right in the first draft, but that would be a pretty impressive feat. Maybe some writers are able to think everything through in advance and produce a flawless first draft that only needs a little polishing at the sentence level before it's ready to go out into the world. I assert that most writers who believe they fall into this category are mistaken.

After I finished all the planning and procrastinating that led up to my current revision, I had a good idea of what changes the manuscript needed and how I intended to address each issue. The changes were more extensive than I'd hoped. They were also, I'd eventually recognize, more extensive than I understood at the beginning.

I started actually revising in February 2011. I can't remember what timescale I had in mind when I wrote, "I don't have a good idea of how long this revision will take, except for being pretty sure that it will take longer than I want it to." But I seem to recall that my most pessimistic estimate still had me finishing by the end of the year.

What can I say? I'm a fiction writer -- my grip on reality is tenuous. If I'd really thought about it at the beginning, I would have seen that my planned changes were so significant, and my desire to get things right in this revision so strong, that I couldn't possibly write this draft faster than the previous one, which took eight months. I suppose I didn't want to really think about it, because it would have been too disheartening.

There's nothing wrong with taking a long time to make a novel good. You might even argue that it's highly advisable. But I'm impatient, and I was ready to be done a long time ago. And I imagine that I inadvertently passed that expectation on to my family, friends, and blog readers, who are by now puzzled that I'm still doing whatever it is I've been doing.

What revision consists of on a day-to-day basis isn't especially interesting to describe. I take things one scene at a time, consult my notes about the changes needed, and do the appropriate combination of incorporating material from the previous draft and writing new material. Eventually the scene is complete, and I move on to the next one. I always work through a story in order, though in this case I'm revising my three storylines one at a time rather than according to the interspersed order of the novel.

That's the ideal of my revision process, at least. In practice, there's also a lot of reconsidering my earlier decisions, discovering things I failed to take into account, and having potentially brilliant ideas that send the story off in other directions. All of which cause the revision to take that much longer. So at this point, I still can't accurately predict when I'll be done. Someday, and it will be worth the wait.

Now, have I answered all your questions about how my novel is coming along, or is there still more you want to know? Please comment if there's anything else I should address. And thank you again for asking.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Meg Wolitzer, writing for the New York Times Book Review, covers the variety of problems with the term "women's fiction": "If 'The Marriage Plot,' by Jeffrey Eugenides, had been written by a woman yet still had the same title and wedding ring on its cover, would it have received a great deal of serious literary attention?"

The Revision Planning Stage, or Procrastinating

At the end of last month, I set out to explain what exactly I've been doing to my novel during this revision. As you may have noticed, I'm taking a long time and many posts to provide an answer. This is, of course, all a carefully designed way to demonstrate the slowness of the process. Show, don't tell, and all that. Absolutely my intent. No question.

Previously on this rambling account, after I wrote a second draft of the novel from scratch, I brought the manuscript to my critique group and learned where the story still fell short of what it could be. The work with my critique group took about three months in the spring and summer of 2010, which gave me a good break from actively working on the novel. I've reviewed the records of my life to figure out what else I did during that time -- it was mostly reading, real life stuff, and starting this blog.

My first step in revising the novel again was to plan out the changes I wanted to make. I recommend this step. Whether or not you use any type of outline or notes when writing a first draft, it's valuable to prepare for subsequent drafts by taking stock of what you've written and how it compares to the story you're trying to write. Without this preparation, it's difficult to know how to even approach a revision.

There are all sorts of ways to map out your story. You might want to use index cards and sticky notes, or you might prefer software. I used both in the planning stage for this revision, and both were useful.

Now, if you look at those two posts linked in the paragraph above, you'll notice they're dated six months apart. I would not, in general, recommend that you spend six months on the revision planning stage. Especially if the real delay is not so much the intense planning and research you're doing but instead your tendency toward distraction and your fear of getting started. To be fair, there were also a couple of months in there when life responsibilities consumed most of my possible writing time, but still.

During this prolonged planning stage, besides making notes on little bits of real and virtual paper, I also took the bold step of reading my manuscript so I knew what I was dealing with. And I wrote a detailed synopsis of the plot as I wanted it to be in order to test my intended changes in miniature before applying them to the actual manuscript. I recommend both these steps for anyone preparing to revise.

But again, I advise that you try not to take forever about it. There's a fine line between planning and procrastinating. I'm usually on the wrong side, and that's part of the answer to the question of why I'm not finished revising yet.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Juliette Wade discusses Completion, and Resonance: why the first chapter is like the last: "If you've been writing for any significant length of time, you've probably heard people say that last chapters should come full circle, and that they should resemble first chapters in some critical way."