Revising/Re-drafting/Editing?

One handy aspect of this blog from my own perspective is that I’ve gradually found many other blogs that I’ve linked to and taken RSS and Atom feeds from (see toolbar on the right). Some are those written by friends and others are some really useful sites written by editors, agents and authors.

I was reading a post of NaNoWriMo on How Publishing Really Works which had a link to a page on This Itch of Writing, novelist Emma Darwin’s blog, about revising and editing. The article starts off by discussing the semantics of what the words editing and revising actually mean but goes on to make some excellent points about the teaching of writing  — some which have similarly occurred to me.

Emma Darwin uses some railway and engineering metaphors to argue the logical point that writing a novel is such a huge undertaking that, even with careful planning, it’s usually inevitable that it does (or should) become evident while writing that there are structural issues (plot problems, characters that don’t work) which will need addressing. Rather than give up and start again, she recommends carrying on with a very rough first draft on the basis that, once at the end, it will be easier to address the structure of the novel as a whole.

Interestingly, this was the advice — plough on and finish a rough first draft — that we received from our tutors towards the end of the City Novel Writing course — and that many of us have realised in practice. However, it’s very difficult advice for students on courses to take for a couple of reasons — one internal and one external.

Most people who can write to a reasonable standard, but who haven’t had the experience of producing a work of about 100,000 words plus are probably instinctively unhappy in writing something that they know can be improved without going back to edit it fairly soon afterwards. There are some comments on appended to the post on This Itch of Writing that suggest writers go back and hone recently written prose because it’s a bit of a cop-out — that’s it’s easier than telling oneself it will be sorted out eventually as it’s more important to continue on with a roughly-written draft that will expose plot, setting, character and so on to greater scrutiny.

I think those comments are somewhat self-deprecating — that sort of close line-editing is actually quite hard to do well and very time-consuming in itself. I suspect that one reason why people do it is that they perhaps lack the confidence that they will ever return to re-write it — that the whole enterprise may be abandoned and, therefore, it might be better to produce a well-written chapter partly perhaps to demonstrate that one’s capable of it and maybe to be re-used in the distant future. Perhaps.

However, the external reason that applies to people on Creative Writing courses is all to do with how writing is taught.   Emma Darwin says in her post ‘I think it’s because so much writing-teaching focuses on the small scale. That’s partly because prose is easier stuff to read and write and teach on in class-sized chunks, than structure is…So writers embarking on their first novel are often quite aware of the micro-work it takes, but much less aware of the macro’. For example, on the City University course the  workshopping is structured into about six or seven opportunities to read 2,250 words — perhaps not uncoincidentally each about the length of the short stories that are assessed on the OU Creative Writing courses.

I wondered after finishing the course what difference it might have made to have given each writer a couple of slots of about 7,500 words each. I can see that practically it might make some students wait a long time for a workshop and also wouldn’t allow much opportunity to develop the work having received feedback but it would give an experience less like writing a short story — both to the writer but, also more importantly perhaps, to the other students offering feedback.

Someone called Sally Z posted a comment after the Itch of Writing post relating her experiences with a writing group. The members would always ask the ‘big’ questions when asking for criticism on a piece of writing (e.g. do these characters work?). But the sort of feedback that was offered tended to be detailed stuff about punctuation and on the over-use of adverbs. (The ritual slaughter of adverbs is a bête noir of mine that seems to be promoted by people who seem to over-evangelise some of Stephen King’s style advice in ‘On Writing’.)

Close attention to the text is certainly necessary before a novel is submitted to a publisher or agent but Emma Darwin argues that a writer who has polished up a section of a novel to publishable standard may be much more reluctant to subsequently make wholesale changes that may be necessary to improve the structure of the entire novel. However, if you participate in a writing course then it’s almost unavoidable that you will sweat hard to make your prose as good as possible as you won’t want your precious feedback to solely consist of other students pointing out passive sentences, repeated words, too many adverbs and similar textual elements. And it would also seem a bit perverse on any writing course to ask someone to circulate first draft work without worrying about typos and errors as other people will get distracted by them whatever — it’s a bit like walking down the street with your flies open.

However, if one does feel capable of creating reasonably good prose given the opportunity to edit later, what’s most important is to discover how the novel works as a whole — which is fairly tough when readers are exposed to small chapter-length chunks, especially if not in sequence, as I tend to have presented mine. I have a slightly perverse theory that if a 2,250 word extract of a novel works perfectly as a self-contained piece and doesn’t raise any questions of context with the rest of the novel then the writer isn’t really producing a novel — because a novel must necessarily have strands and elements that only make sense when read in its entirety.

Another unintended side-effect of over-examining the prose style is that writers may be tempted to concentrate on a sort of  literary ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ — it’s much easier to praise someone’s brilliant imagery or use of metaphor because examples can be cited from the text than it is to praise something more abstract — such as empathy with an emotion or resonance of setting. Of course there’s nothing wrong with some competition spurring people on to better writing but some genres are more suited to the sort of writing that’s easily praised than others.

For various practical reasons, it might be impossible to teach the more structural aspects of novel-writing in a course or to offer feedback in most writers group — mainly because of the investment in time required. What might be better is for novelists to learn from the examples from the canon of literature — this ties back into the much repeated recommendation that ‘writers have to be readers’ (more Stephen King advice like over adverbs that’s sensible in itself but not when mis-applied in extreme). I know one person from the City course who’s considering doing his next course not in creative writing but in English Literature — and this may be a very astute choice.

The Manchester Metropolitan University MA course has so far taken a similar path — we’ve been studying one novel a week from a brilliantly varied and idiosyncratic list but together by the tutor Dr Jenny Mayhew. When we’ve come to discuss the texts, rather than a loose ‘book-club’ type discussion, we’ve largely concentrated on the ‘big’ questions — like structure, character, narration, use of time and so on. The discussion on these points has the benefit of being able to examine finished, published works.

Personally I’ve done something of a mixture of the rough and (hopefully) more polished. I have quite a bit of rough draft that I’ve produced with the aim of ploughing on and just getting it done but, because of the workshopping and, also because I like to get feedback in other ways, I’ve gone back and spent a long time re-working certain sections for the benefit of other readers — partly with the objective of pleasing the adverb police and also a bit of vanity in fishing for compliments on phrases, metaphors or imagery — which is dangerous as it’s an encouragement to over-write.

As is mentioned in the original blog posts, there are two sorts of professional attitude required by successful novel writers — the discipline to plough ahead and get a first-draft finished and then the maturity to realise how much revision and re-drafting that draft needs before you even think about line-editing.

Does anyone else have any thoughts about how to address the ‘big’ issues in a novel while mired in the middle of writing it?

5 Replies to “Revising/Re-drafting/Editing?”

  1. just keep going…some of these issues I am finding will tend to pop their heads above the parapit when you least expect eg after I met with my psychiatrist friend who took my protagonists case history and said I already “had him nailed” – more or less – she presented me with food for thought on the plot and I went away and rewrote an entirely new beginning/First chapter as a result – because it seemed the right thing to do.
    Ive just come back from a tutorial with Emma who looked at it and also the original chapter one(which changed already during the course of our shared workshops , atleast three times)…and she says of the new completely fresh opening chapter that it works brilliantly well – much much stronger than the old chapter one.

    The editing that arises from tutorials from new material Ive submitted she’s advised me to put away and just carry on writing. When I have completed a first draft of everything THEN I’ll go back. I am comming to learn how wise this advice is. Also that writing a novel, especialy a first novel, must be a proces akin to completing a PhD! research and original dissertation…

    BG

  2. Yes. At the same time as working on my novel I’ve also been doing a research dissertation (master’s level — not PhD) in Software Development and, even though that’s coming on well, I can say writing the novel is a lot, lot more work — so yes a novel is probably equivalent of a PhD — and that can take people anything between 3 and 8 years!

    A dissertation is probably quite similar — you start out with an idea, research it, the write it up then analyse it and go back and change a lot of the ideas you had to start with.

    The advice of writing the first draft to the end is very sensible — I think the issue that hit home with me in Emma Darwin’s blog was that that approach is largely incompatible with the way creative writing courses are taught (or probably ever could be).

  3. Mike, what an interesting post – and thanks for the link to mine.

    I think everyone works out their own process over the first two or three novels they write: what is the best frequency for them of the cycle of first-draft-then-revise-then-rerevise-then-polish (whole novel? each chapter? each scene? each sentence?).

    I’ve realised that an awful lot of what I’ve come to think of as My Process – the way I set about writing a novel – is about trying to cope with the scale of the beast. Things like: I always work forwards in the same direction as the reader reads, whatever the issue I’m sorting out; writing the first draft very fast and non-stop; doing a bit of planning beforehand but also tracking things like weather as I go… Other writers have other ways.

    I do think there is a fundamental problem of scale, with writing a novel on a course. The only Masters I know which overcomes it to some degree is the MPhil at Glamorgan, which consists of nothing but working on your novel/collection with a supervisor and your seven fellow students: it’s more like a short PhD in structure. I workshopped chapters at 10-15,000 words a time, at 45mins per workshop. Which meant that about 2/3rds of what wan’t yet The Mathematics of Love got looked at – it’s 141,000 altogether. My supervisor saw everything, and I circulated the other chapters for information. Don’t know any other course that does it that way, except possibly the new one at City University which is also focussed on book-length work.

    And yes, a novel is like a PhD. Although for my CW PhD I had to do a novel AND a 30,000 word dissertation…

  4. Emma,

    How great that you found my blog post so quickly (and ploughing through all 1,500 words of it) and thanks very much for contributing such a detailed comment on your experiences.

    I was going to post a comment on your ‘Are You a Course Junkie?’ blog posting because I think I’m turning into one — although nothing as bad as the person who said she once did eight at the same time.

    I’ve now got enough experience of the courses available to realise there’s something of a paradox as probably the majority of fiction writers who take creative writing courses have an ambition to write novels because they’re by far the most popular form. However, as we’ve both commented, they are such large-scale undertakings — particularly for people learning the craft — that it’s difficult to imagine how novel-writing could be taught apart from in a very lengthy course with a low student-tutor ratio.

    I noticed from your blog that you tutor on the OU A215 course — which I’ve taken — and I also did the first presentation of A363 — which has an option to write the first 3-4,000 words of a novel for the ECA. That led me on to the City University course — which perhaps is the one you mentioned, although it’s around 6-7 years old at least. That’s the Certificate in Novel Writing — but that still only formally assessed us on four chapters — about 15,000 words in my case (and I managed to get another 12,000 or so tutor assessed during the course). Because it’s an intensive twice a week in person course (or equivalent) it’s very good at getting you in a ‘writers” frame of mind rather than a hobby-ist — nearly six months after finishing all but a couple of us are going out for a Christmas meal together tomorrow in London (including Bren Gosling who commented above).

    One of the published authors from the City Course is Penny Rudge (who’s mentioned a few times in the blog) and she took the Masters and PhD route after finishing at City. I’ve followed by enrolling on the MA at Manchester Metropolitan University — which, in the mode that I’m doing it, expects a novel to be produced over three years — the summer terms of years one and two and the whole year three are devoted to personal writing which seems quite realistic to me.

    Having said that, one of our number from the City course, did an amazing sprint and produced about 90,000 words in a fortnight or so.

    We saw an example on the City course of a dissertation that a PhD student had written to accompanied a novel. It looked really interesting.

    As regards the original question of writing first drafts quickly and then revising them I guess quite a lot of it is about writers having the confidence that they can come back to what they’ve written and make it better later on — and probably a lot of that confidence will come from having had a novel published. I’ve seen quite a number of bloggers address the anxiety of new writers — the ‘is it any good?’ question — and I guess that people like to get the re-assurance that they’ve at least written a fragment of something that’s of publishable standard — perhaps a bit like the ECA in OU A363?

    You’ll guess from the length of this reply and the original post that I have no problem myself in applying the grind it out, even if it’s rough and ready, principle to my blogging. I just need to apply it more to the novel — 2,500 words of which will be exposed to my ex-coursemates’ scrutiny tomorrow.

    Mike

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