Novel revision, three ways
Introducing the three phases I go through to get a novel right.
On Monday, I returned from Ellijay, Georgia (where my father’s side of the family lives— or at least lives temporarily after relocating there from Chattanooga) to HEAPS of snow. The winter in my corner of the northeast is loooong A.F. Without the beautiful snow to look at, it feels even longer. So we are overjoyed to have this white visitor upon us.
The snow is the perfect companion for a revision that’s upon me. The word “revision” is not a noun for me, it is an active, ceaseless verb. Sharing my revision process is a risky undertaking because it has so many phases. (The moon has 8 lunar phases. I think my revision process has about 28?)
To break things down as simply as I can, I’m organizing my revision process for novel-writing into three principal phases:
Phase One: Find the story
Phase Two: Edit the story
Phase Three: Revise for the market
Phases Two and Three of my revision process are going to be behind a paywall, and Phase Three will require a strong stomach. Don’t forget, I have a special sale going on through the 15th for new subscribers! If you take advantage of this discount, you can avail yourself of the useful tips in Phase Two and the horrors of Phase Three.
Without further ado, let’s get into it. Fetch a comforting beverage because my revision process—especially in the first phase—is chaotic and might offend those with sensitive dispositions. People often tell me I seem organized and productive and this is mostly true, but it’s also true that my organization and productivity begins in total chaos and ends with something clean.
Throughout each phase, I’ll try and illustrate how/where/when my literary agent is involved, because I know people have questions about writer/agent collaborations before a project is submitted. You buckled up? Let’s go.
PHASE ONE: I find the story
Historically, it takes me two years to write a novel. The first year is spent trying to find out what the hell I’m writing about (or what I want to write about), and the second year is spent writing and revising the book I’ve unearthed.
Perhaps the above confession has you picturing me spending a year outlining and writing chapters for my novel? Nope. Stop picturing that.
Year one has me writing 1-2 full length novel manuscripts that are not remotely connected to the one I’ll finally settle on.
I write the first novel manuscript fairly quickly: maybe in five months. After typing “The End,” I decide I am a genius. I let my agent know that I have knocked it out of the park and that I am a genius. I print out the manuscript and do a few rounds of revisions, then send it to my agent so she can confirm that I’m a star.
What happens instead is that my agent picks out one thing from the manuscript to salvage. I’m not kidding. ONE THING. For my second novel TOUCH, she liked the main character’s job, and told me I should build the book around that job. For the novel I’m working on now, there was one sentence in the first manuscript she thought I should build the book around—I can’t even remember what it was.
Let me reiterate: I hand my literary agent an entire novel manuscript, and she picks one element to build a new book around. I heed her advice, because she’s nearly always right. So I burn that first book down and build another one around whatever thing she wants me to salvage.
That second novel manuscript takes a shorter amount of time because my inner chaos agent is manning the ship now: maybe four months. By this point, I’m feeling desperate and a little bit unhinged. I revise, revise, revise, then hand that second manuscript to my agent, certain at this point that I’m very far from genius. Traditionally with this second manuscript she’ll announce that I’ve gone completely off the rails and that I need to reign the whole mess in.
At this point, I have a mini breakdown. I decide she’s wrong, I’m wrong, everything is wrong and I should stop trying to write fiction. After a few days, an existential mist lifts and I see the book I should be writing. Usually, it’s a book that I started (or maybe even finished) seven years earlier and burned down. It’s often the book that I told my agent I wanted to write at the start of the whole process before I started writing and handing in other manuscripts.
Lest you think my agent is cruel or too hardcore, let me assure you this isn’t how she works with other writers, and it’s not how agents interact with clients. My poor agent is curt with me to save me from myself. In the beginning when we started working together (a full decade ago!) she took my “starter” manuscripts seriously, doing line edits, trying to be kind about what a heap of trash they were.
But she caught on quickly. My full, initial novel drafts aren’t even drafts—they are cries for help. That’s why she doesn’t linger on them. She tries to spin me in the right direction so I can pin the damn tail on the donkey.
For the novel I’m currently revising, (which, I hope above all hopes is the freaking ONE), I outdid myself and shape shifted it through three different books:
Book one was about a man who tries to get himself out of a depression by going to clown school. (I wrote that one entirely, and also attended clown school so I could write it from experience. More about that later.)
Book two was about a gifted gardener who finds herself in a vicious garden league (I wrote about 60% of that one).
Book three was a lesbian rom com that also had to do with gardening (I wrote that one completely and revised it and believed in it. But it wasn’t good.)1
While I’d like to tell you that book four is created from the ashes of the three tries before it, that shared DNA is hard to find. The central marriage in book four replicates the troubled union in book one, but my current novel has no gardening—it’s about a homeowner’s association. The married folks are straight, instead of same-sex as they were in book three. In book two, my main character lived below the poverty line. In book four, they’re one percenters. Save me from myself.
When I finally find the book I’m meant to write and the story that needs telling, only then does my writing and revision take on a form that looks more like what people consider “writing and revising” to look like in their heads.
I write the book, working as I go to develop the characters, their backstories, the page turner elements of plot. I do massive revisions section by section (Act I, Act II, conclusion) so that the book doesn’t get away from me. Once I’ve revised piecemeal for each section, I send the book to my local Staples, pay about $45 bucks to have it nicely printed, and take myself to lunch to celebrate.
Then I start Phase Two.
