My Story Revision Process
Recently, a Subscriber sent me what he said was an Ernest Hemingway quote:
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
E.H. made me think and ask myself: How many drafts do I crank through and why?
I know that for a, say, 1.5K-word short story, I usually need about ten daily revisions to get to the point where I can consider the story “written”. By that time, I am either really excited because the story sublimated, or I am really frustrated because there is an invisible problem and the 10X-revised story still isn’t working.
Sometimes I have enough self-control about the story to allow myself to toss the paper pages aside somewhere, pull the plug and let the story concept drain out of my bath-tub mind. I know that, given time, I’ll see the story’s weaknesses(which are always there) clearly.
So, a couple of weeks or even a month after my first ten drafts, I pick up the pages of the story and I am revising again. What often happens is that I have a story I particularly love and I have re-worked it maybe 25 times, but honestly, there’s still a problem – it bogs down somewhere. There’s a dreadfully slow spot. The slow spot is usually caused by what I call “lack of movement”. The action in that central spot of that story just doesn’t grab. It’s a nifty bit of action, but it just doesn’t bloody-well move!
What comes to mind then is sort of like trying to pick all the little green stems and reddish rejects out of a big, beautiful batch of deep, dark Huckleberries – that gets deeper and darker as you sit in the sun and sip wine and pick away and eject the stems and bugs; you never expect to see the end - never. But you almost always do; the almost-ness of some stories can really, really drive you nuts. But being nuts about a story is normal. A story isn’t a calculation. Writing a story, you are arting. If you are really arting, you can expect some strain.
Working on a good novel takes even more. You want your novel to be a beautiful thing - not just a stinkin’ novel - but a thing of actual, sublime beauty. Most of my chapters are 1.5-2.5K words, but they are each part of a larger, DEFINITELY-NOT-DRAGGED-OUT composition. Each individual chapter gets r-r-revised. The combination of the chapters gets r-r-revised. The number of times I revise/re-write/reject/delete some chapters is like what Kaiser Wilhelm is known to have said when asked during the First World War, “How many Russians have been killed so far?” The Kaiser could only answer, “Six millions, eight millions, who can tell?”
A key driver for revision for me is that I always want a story to have a certain kind of total “speed” to it – the way it reads. I have to kill a lot of my “darlings” - as they say in Publishing – to get the speed I want.
Is my first draft always “shit”? I know my first draft is always exciting(in fact, in my own mind, legendary). It’s always my first attempt to explain my story idea to myself. During the first draft, I know I’m on the verge of discovery.
There’s, too, a certain sadness – a post-partem – to my final draft; I’ve explored and defined people who are now real and I love them and have to leave them and submit them somewhere for publication and go live with some other, initially nebulous sport fans I’ve dreamed up.