NaNoWriMo Day 29
When is a book really over or done? I get that sense when it starts to look like this magic trick where everything is balanced because everything that is there has to be there and if anything is there that isn’t supposed to be, it would collapse:
How do you get there? Revision. When does that start? No earlier than December 1.
I say “no earlier than” because you actually shouldn’t start it right away. You’ve just been on a month-long party. You’ve made some great friends, went to some amazing places, and you might not want to leave them for a while. Nonetheless, it’s a great idea to step away from the book for a month. Let it breathe and let yourself enjoy some normal time again.
If you stay in the book and try to switch to revising right away, you won’t have the fresh eyes you need to do it properly. You’ve been seeing your book through the eyes of its writer, but your readers will never have those eyes. You need them, though, for your readers’ sake.
Like the friends you made at your party, you’ve spent so much time with them that you haven’t noticed their quirks, or if you did, they might have seemed endearing to you. If you let your friends go away for a month, when you bring them back, you’ll notice things about them you didn’t notice before. You might find that one guy’s laugh that you thought was hilarious is actually pretty obnoxious. Or the person who while she talks occasionally tries to pick that piece of spinach out of her teeth somehow never manages to get it out. Or that the jokes that the stand-up comedian who jumped out of the cake made weren’t actually that funny. That comes with distance, and distance comes with 4-6 weeks away.
You’ll see things that made perfect sense to you while you had everything fresh in your head actually aren’t that clear. For example, you might have a passage of dialogue where two guys are talking and you wrote, “he said,” and you thought it was obvious that Bert was talking but when you’re reading it with distance, you get confused because it sounds like it was Ernie who said that now. Or you never gave a noun an antecedent because the image of what you had in your head didn’t make it onto the paper, as in, “He picked it up and swung it at the lemur’s femur.” You knew when you were writing it that “it” was the chair, but the last thing you wrote was your character reaching for a banana. If you’re confused now, then your reader will be, too.
Now that you’ve learned to write a novel by actually writing one, you’re going to need to learn to start revising one by actually revising one. I actually don’t recommend studying how to revise until after you’ve completed your first pass through. You’re going to learn a lot on that pass, and you’ll do it the most effective way: by actually doing it.
On that pass through, you might actually start feeling the opposite of the elation you felt while you were writing it. While you were typing away in November, everything felt fun and brilliant and now everything feels tedious and a lot of the “brilliant” things aren’t. You may wonder why you didn’t have these doubts back in November. That’s not just okay, that’s excellent. It means you let yourself be creative during NaNoWriMo. You let yourself take risks without that psychic censor saying, “That’s not a good idea,” over and over.
The worse it seems, the better you did. Because now you’re looking at it from a frame of, “How do I make this good?” instead of, “This has to be perfect before it ever sees the light of day.” That second voice would have kept you from having all the material you have before you to edit. It would have left you with a blank page, and you can edit crap, but you can’t edit a blank page.
Have fun and enjoy that process, too. The first draft process was messy and ugly. The revision process is when you take that ugly mess and give it a makeover. You take the Mister Potato Head-looking manuscript and move the lips from the eye socket to its mouth. You put its arms facing the same direction (and front, this time).
No gold miner would say, “Throw it away. You’ll never be a good miner because all your gold comes out covered in a bunch of dirt.”
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