Steve Martin once said, “Comedy is not pretty.” Serious revision is neither comedy nor pretty. Does it feel hard? If so, good. Revision is that exercise at the gym that you know you should do but you hate. Or that saying about marathons that they’re not half over until you’re past the twentieth mile.
Here’s a personal example of the grind. I recently did a 90-minute work session on a manuscript I already consider finished. And polished. And polished again. And tightened. And squeezed. Plus polished. Every word counts. Every scene has at least one purpose, and usually multiple reasons for being in the book. There are no pages I skip over, hoping the reader won’t. If I don’t want to read it for the 25th time, why would they want to read it once?
That means it’s finished. It’s been finished. Now all I’m trying to do it tighten it even more, like putting on a belt the day after Thanksgiving. The goal is to see if I can squeeze it down to a “mere” 150,000 words. It’s not a goal I think I can realistically reach—it’s like trying to eat the cream filling out of a Twinkie without touching the cake or or recycled cardboard or high-fructose depleted uranium or whatever it is that Twinkies are made out of, but who knows when I might come across a thousand words that can be moved to the “deleted scenes” folder for now and put back in for the director’s cut someday.
Here’s the data from that hour and a half of brain-and-word crunching:
- Begin page: 68/339
- Beginning word count: 163,024
- End page: 85
- End word count: 162,943
- Pages revised: 17
- Minutes per page: 5.3
- Session word count: -81 (less than one per minute!)
On the bright side, it’s still shorter than The Da Vinci Code’s 170,000 words.
Plus all the dialogue that’s funny is intentionally funny.
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