Buckle up, folks: this one's going to be a bit of a ramble. But first, some updates.
I am exactly where I was last week, which means I still have one chapter (approximately 15 pages) left to go for my line edits. I have queries to examine and possibly revise for the fourth time before I send them out beginning in February. I have two beta readers who want to become alpha readers sometime in the month of January after the holidays are over and before school begins. And I have a lot of ideas percolating for Book 2 revisions, which I plan to start in earnest once I finish my Book 1 line edits.
But, although I did not travel far at all in terms of my progress, I mentally made so much headway. Last night, I presented my capstone and it was wonderful, despite it being a thing I very much did not want to go to. I also turned in my capstone paper. Sunday I spent 8 hours writing a paper that should have taken me 4 for another one of my classes--but, hey, I got it done. I found a light at the end of the tunnel and a potential end to the endless exhaustion.
And, most importantly, I learned that a part of my exhaustion is me being overworked and stretched too thin. But the bigger part of it? I am severely anemic. Like "why don't you have a headache all the time, because how is blood even getting to your brain?" anemic. Like "shouldn't your hair be super brittle and falling out right now?" anemic. Like "why doesn't your heart hurt from the strain you're putting it through?" anemic.
And all of these things HAVE been happening, but I'm a chronically ill grad student. So, like...I didn't really think about it? I just kinda kept on trucking as pieces were literally falling off of the truck. But now I have the space to start taking care of myself and the easiest fix I've ever had for my myriad health problems: just take iron pills.
Just in case they don't react well with my reflux meds (because iron is notoriously hard on the gut), I'm starting them once the semester's done. So, in a week.
And I'm excited because if I've been able to be this productive with the tank on E, imagine how great I'll feel once I'm no longer anemic. My brain fog should clear up. My energy levels should get better. My head will hurt its usual amount, not extra. I'm anticipating a season of productivity like the beautiful stretch I had in summer 2021, and I'll officially be done grad school, which has eaten my entire life for the past few months.
So, in light of that, I wanted to reflect upon some of the work that I've been doing and some of the work I anticipate ahead of me (and also because my best friend/beta asked me what the difference was between what I'm doing now and what I'd spent the past year doing, and I forgot that not everyone is entrenched in writing/editing terminology).
If you've been following my blog for this long, you know that I don't think writing is difficult for me. Words come very naturally, and because of that, I love revising more than I love drafting. I love cutting the fat and seeing the story take shape. I race through my first draft specifically because I know there will be a second and a third...so why try so hard?
If there are five stages of writing...
Prewriting (planning)
Drafting
Revising
Editing
Publication
...then number 3 is where I am most comfortable, but not everyone is. So, if you're working on your own draft, or just wondering what I've actually been up to, I want to explain the stage that I love most and how it's different from the thing I'm doing now.
Basically, the drafting stage is the stage where you get all those ideas in your head onto the page, and you don't care (or rather, you shouldn't care) whether it actually looks good and sounds good. There may be parts you really love and will eventually retain, but for the most part, your first draft is, as Neil Gaiman puts it, you telling the story to yourself.
Bless the beta reader that slogs through a first draft. They are the true MVPs. If they drink, you should buy them a drink. If they don't, you should take them out to dinner or something, because they're the bomb.
In my first draft, characters were mere sketches of people, more plot devices to move Ais's story forward than anything, and Ais herself was not particularly compelling either. Characters frequently changed their motivations to benefit the story. Plot holes were frequent and large. The worldbuilding was stupidly overwrought and yet ridiculously thin at the same time. There were also too many characters and not enough locations. We stayed mired in very uninteresting places, both literally and thematically.
Part of beginning a successful revision is knowing your story's flaws, and this can be hard, so have an anecdote.
When I first started learning how to do complex makeup looks, I followed a YouTuber called My Pale Skin. Like me, she had pale skin and cystic acne, so I studied her acne coverage tutorials religiously. This girl, Em, loved using bronzer and warm tones, and also that was on trend at the time (it was 2016), so I decided that's where I would start.
The first full face makeup look I tried looked "just like Em." Only, it didn't. My bronzer application was poorly done and made me look low-key kinda dirty (and also I'd find out later that only taupe bronzers actually work on my cool-neutral skin). My eyeshadow was just...strange. It was like Taylor Momson's raccoon eyes and the soul-crushing stare of the Olsen twins had a baby, but that baby wasn't blended and had fallout everywhere and also made me look scary and sick at the same time. My eyebrows were a tragedy. You know the expression "sisters, not twins"? They were distant cousins, thrice removed.
And yet, I went to school in this look. I went to the grocery store in this look. I went to a dance in a cobalt-blue variant of this look. And I felt no shame, because it was the best I could do at the time, even if it didn't resemble either the artistry of Em or the vision in my head of how I thought I looked.
It was only through a reflection a year later that I could conclude: "my god, I looked terrible. I'm so thankful I'm better now." Only, the biggest difference here was that I'd ditched the bronzer. So next year, I repeated the process until I got better and better at makeup, and each year continued to critically examine (and cringe) at old photos of me thinking I looked good.
This reflection not only taught me my flaws, but how to fix them. A complex eye look requires multiple brushes. Fine, hairlike strokes work better for brows than aggressive pressure. Blush works better to make me look alive than bronzer, because I naturally blush, not bronze.
Once I had learned my flaws, I of course researched where I'd gone wrong. And now, we're talking about writing.
Because this process is the same. Probably in your life you've had a similar experience to my makeup fails. Whatever that experience was for you, replicating that experience in writing is called the revision process.
It requires time and distance so you can critically examine your work away from the gut instinct to say "I finished this book, I am amazing!" (even though you very much are). It also requires heavy reading of books both in and outside of the genre to identify fixes.
If, for example, I've already identified that my main character appears to have no motive, what is a successful first-person story in any genre that does so? What is a crappy story that does not do that? What is the difference between the two and where does mine fall into that paradigm?
The reading part is crucial. In fact, I would say that continuing to read, even while you are working on your own revisions, is essential, because otherwise you enter an echo chamber in which you slowly start to forget what published books are doing...and what you are not.
I would also read outside of your genre. I say this not because reading YA fantasy slowly became painful because I was wracked with spasms of fear and envy over my own inevitable publication success or failure (it did), but because of the aforementioned echo chamber. Reading poetry, for instance, taught me to stretch meaning out of spare words in a way that my previously overburdened prose didn't. Reading literary fiction gave me permission to do time skips so as not to show the mundanity of everyday life...and how to imbue those time skips with lyrical meaning. Reading BookTok bestsellers taught me how to take my obscure little story and cater it to popular tastes without also compromising my initial vision.
So revision is a process of discovery all around--of discovering what works with your draft and what does not, and also of discovering the beating heart of your story.
I like to keep a physical notebook for the latter, although I very much champion digital in most other aspects (carpal tunnel makes typing so much more ideal than handwriting, especially because I write in cursive and it gets increasingly illegible).
Through drawing character and family trees in my notebook, I was able to identify extraneous characters and merge them into one. I was also able to identify Ais's conflict.
"Ais /=/ mother --> big fear of becoming" is one of my earliest notes from my first round of revisions, for example.
During this process, I would caution against getting discouraged. Because your second draft still will probably not resemble your ideal vision, but it'll be much closer. You'll have discovered that bronzer isn't for you, but you've yet to learn exactly why your eyebrows look wonky, even though you've at least identified that they do look wonky.
Once you discover the key components of your story in a revision (or bring them to the forefront if they were already present in the draft), you'll want to hold onto them throughout subsequent revisions. This is one of the hardest parts.
In the first draft, taking an attitude of "everything must go" is fine, because large portions of it probably suck. But subsequent drafts give you little shiny nuggets. For example, there is a scene in chapter 11-12 where Ais is caught in a market attack upon the rebels. This scene was added in Draft 2. This scene has remained, with minimal changes to the final draft.
There is another scene where Ais fights Saoirse in true enemies to lovers style. This scene was present in Draft 1, but poorly done and placed in the wrong location (chapter 14). Subsequent drafts have moved and tweaked and revised the scene, but the idea of having a scene like that remains. So, it must be protected. Changes must be made around it. Everything must go but this.
These parts become the hardest. Because, at least in my drafts, when one big thing isn't working, sometimes massive changes to the structure of the whole book must be made, so it becomes a game. That's when the editor's block begins.
In line editing, the "everything must go" strategy and the editor's block risk significantly lessens, because your draft is functional and coherent at this stage. Line editing mainly serves to get rid of what my brilliant professor calls "stylistic tics." For example, I have a love of dashes and cutting characters off mid-speech, probably because I do it irl. In a book, though, this is annoying.
In the revision stage, I marked my overuse of dashes down as a concern, but didn't seriously care to fix it because I knew many scenes would get tweaked anyway. But in the line editing phase, I had to start caring about this.
I also read heavily during this phase, but I read for a stylistic sense of the authors, rather than a global concern. Close-reading became essential, about getting into the minutia. Does a semicolon function better here? What is the ratio of dialogue tags to description for an evocative scene? How can I slow my readers down during emotionally impactful scenes, and yet speed them up during an action scene? Is this inner thought consistent with Ais, or does this sound so out of character that it brings the reader out of the moment?
I'm not ashamed to admit I heavily read Poe for this, as well as the brilliant Ottesa Moshfegh, queen of the repulsive first person narration.
And I basically did that throughout the entire book, noting along the way potential concerns and plot holes and being delighted when I found minimal (check last week's blog to know if you're ready for that step!).
Anyway, I gotta go to my second-to-last Critical Race Theory class. Bye now.
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