Revision can #*&^ right off

Except for when it's going well--then I love it

If you’d asked me two weeks ago how revising my novel was going, I would’ve replied with an all caps declarations of GREAT followed by 25 exclamation points and 10 lines of balloon, confetti, and party hat emojis.

I would’ve told you that I LOVE revision—I get a real buzz from moving sentences and paragraphs, deleting repetition, adding description and dialogue that clarifies characters and energizes the plot.

But the past is gone. The present is all we have. In this moment, I fucking hate revision.

I started the year PUMPED about revision. I had clarity about my protagonist and the events of the first act — the path forward felt clear and I was READY TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.

I went gangbusters for a week. I slashed, I cut, I tightened, I rewrote. I moved with confidence and conviction. Possibly my greatest writing high comes from successful revision. When I’m making paragraphs and scenes get clearer and crisper, my enthusiasm and motivation soars. It seems possible to get that beautiful book I have in my mind onto the page.

That’s how it felt the first week I was at it. I cruised along, feeling the satisfying sensation of the scenes lining up, clicking into place like jigsaw puzzle pieces. I started to think I’d be able to get through Act One by the end of the month. Then I got to the Big Scene in Act One.

I knew that in the first draft of the Big Scene, I’d let the protagonist wander a bit. She delivers a lot of dramatic dialogue that I knew was out of character. So in the first revision, I scaled it way back. She said little, was almost silent as the antagonist held court.

I reread that and realized it was wrong too—the protagonist was too quiet. So I went at it again, dialing back the antagonist’s dialogue and making space for the protagonist to say more, but in a more measured way than in the first version.

When I reread that version, I realized much of what the protagonist says in that scene, she’d already said in the previous scene. So I went back a third time, cutting all the dialogue that was repetitive and unnecessary, leaving gaps on the page where new dialogue needed to be added.

I stared at those holes, waiting to hear somebody’s voice, to get a sense of what did belong in the scene, in these people’s mouths. I listened and strained until finally I realized what I was hearing was…absolutely nothing.

Hearing nothing isn’t an uncommon occurrence for me in novel writing. It means I’m heading down the wrong road and need to redirect. It’s not fun when the revision mojo tapers, but it’s part of the game. I took a deep breath, tried to reset. As I thought more and more about the Big Scene, an outrageous idea came to me: maybe the scene I thought was the powerhouse, the anchor of Act One actually doesn’t go into the book at all.

I must admit that’s not my favorite part of revision, but it is one that comes up over and over. Writing a novel is mainly an exercise of taking all the words you were sure belonged and throwing them in the garbage.

So I took a deep breath and moved the scene to the CUTS folder, hoping the next morning that cut would feel right and I could move forward with knitting together the adjacent scenes, smoothing over the jagged edges left by yanking the thing that had previously connected them.

The next morning I poured my tea, negotiated with the cat (it’s hard to write when she’s standing on the keyboard), and took a look at this new terrain, hoping the cut would feel solid and I could move on.

It did not. The cut felt wrong. Removing that scene removed something essential, though I didn’t know exactly what. So I put it back in the line up.

If at this point you’re thinking, gee, this all sounds kind of tedious, WELCOME TO NOVEL WRITING.

I did what there was to do: I kept staring at the scene, thinking about all the things I’d already tried that didn’t work. About how it felt like I was driving in circles, getting nowhere. I still had to figure out what to do with this (#*&% scene, but I was out of ideas. Panic started to set in.

I did what I usually do with my panic: I tried to swim it off, swear it off, and when that doesn’t work, I called in backup.

The first writer friend I consulted listened patiently as I explained all the different approaches to the scene I’d tried, how I had no idea what to try next, and how #$(&%) frustrated I was (there were a lot of swear words). They nodded a lot and I knew their sympathy and understanding was sincere—just a few weeks earlier, we’d been talking about the frustration they were dealing with in their own novel revision.

That conversation wrapped up with a piece of advice I struggle with. “Maybe you could set it aside for now?” they suggested.

It was a good idea, and one I resisted. As I writer I am, to a fault, like a dog playing tug of war. I will never let go of the rope. It feels like conceding defeat.

This is especially stupid because I KNOW taking a break from a problem can give me the space to solve it. And I recommend this to people I work with ALL THE TIME. But given my druthers, I will clamp my jaw around a page and never let go.

Accordingly, I put this suggestion aside and consulted another friend, who asked why the scene mattered. That question can sound obnoxious on the surface, but it made space for me to give a lot of rambling answers that my friend listened intently to. They also worked the angles—if it was removed, what would be lost? If it was done this way, could it work? How does it fit in the book overall? These conversations work best when the sounding board has no agenda, stays open to whatever they hear and sense, and reflects that info back in clear, direct statements. The more we talked it out, the more we agreed: the scene belonged.

This was very affirming. The scene in question was the first scene of the book I wrote. I thought at one time it was the opening, which it is not. But I put a lot of stock in what shows up for us writers when we’re at the beginning of a project—when we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing or where we’re going, are simply letting the soup of our subconscious spill onto the page. My gut said the scene belonged and a long conversation reaffirmed that instinct.

We did not, however, figure out exactly what the scene should consist of or who would say what. But I didn’t feel back at square one. I felt reassured and comforted. I felt secure enough to do what my first adviser had suggested: put it aside for a while.

From this point, one of two things will happen: either I will have an aha moment while spacing out on a walk or cooking dinner, or, as I move forward in the manuscript, I will come across something that connects back, making it obvious what that earlier scene needs to do. Neither of those things has happened yet, but I have no doubt they will.

Till then, I have plenty of other scenes to keep me busy. I’ll keep writing and hopefully fall in love with revision all over again.