Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Revising... Again

I'm revising a book at the moment.  A book I wrote quite a long time ago.  But unlike other times I've revised this book - and believe me, there were many, many revisions done - this time my revision has a purpose and I'm not flailing through it without guidance.

My editor mentioned two things she thought weakened the book, and at this stage, those two things are what I've focused on.  And I feel like I've fixed them.  Unfortunately, when you make big changes in one part of a book, there are ripple effects throughout the rest.

So while I've done the difficult stuff, the rewriting and changing of the plot etc, I now need to go through the rest of the MS to find where things are now inconsistent as a result of the changes I've made.  And I have a feeling that's actually going to be more time consuming than the rewriting I've already done.

Does anyone have any tips on ways to make this process as painless as possible?

4 comments:

  1. I don't have any suggestions, but this will certainly make you as familiar with the book as you could ever hope to be!

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  2. Revising is like taking off a band-aid. There's no easy way. Just get in there and rip that sucker off! Good luck. ;)

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  3. "Revise" -- as in re-vise: "To once again place your head into the jaws of the vise and tighten it until your eyes pop out and you scream at the top of your lungs to, 'Please, God! Make it stop!!!'."

    It's a popular form of self-torture for writerly types...


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  4. Perhaps you should make a list of the changes and go through the book searching for them, then when you've done as much as you can, have someone new look at it to make sure there are no continuity snarls. It's what I would do.

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