Revising, Remodeling, Renovation
March 10th, 2010Last night I finally let the revisions of my newest book out of my hands. I’ve been holding on tightly, making notes, doing conflict charts, thinking about character motivations and story themes. This book was first drafted back in the fall of 2007, for Nanowrimo. It has been revised and overhauled three times since then (thanks to the endless patience of fellow writers who offered suggestions as I blindly felt my way toward the story I was trying to tell — a much more complex and complicated story than I had envisioned when I sat down with enthusiasm in November of 2007 to tell a story of a girl who got dumped in a storm ditch by a tornado).
Now that I’m finished, I feel very much as I did when we had our mud porch torn out — the first flutters of horror at the utter destruction…
eventually giving way to awe at the new and stronger version taking shape…
I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer in shaping and reshaping this story to do exactly what I want it to do: my subconscious instincts are good story fodder, but I have to stop and pay attention to them. Instincts are like architect’s plans. The foundation needs to be strong, concrete, and solid. After I’ve blathered out a draft, I need to go back and make all the conflict and motivation concrete and active (as I tell my students every day). I can get lost in research — and the corollary, I can lose my reader in research, so I need to make every researched item matter to the story and the reader.
I spent more time on the opening and ending of this book than on any other book I’ve ever written — changing the opening sentences very little and the opening chapters very much, and drastically altering the ending each time I revised. It took me until this last revision before I fully understood the conflict I was exploring — what can we when our innermost desire is irrelevant to those who want something bigger, grander, more heroic, from us? We can refuse, of course. But what if by refusing, we lose something personal and precious? Fittingly, this is a YA novel, as the territory of navigating the expectations of the world while listening to our inner compass begins with a vengeance in our teens.
Having just gone through the process as I carved out the true book from the mess of my subconscious blather — I have to say this process never ends.
On to the next book (already three chapters in, yay me). And maybe I’ll tackle renovating the kitchen, since the mud porch reno went so well. Maybe.
Oh, btw, for anyone who has a Mac: Scrivener. It was my first and best critique partner. It kept me sane when I restructured for the umpteenth time, and kept me focused on the scene when I looked to make the conflict concrete and active. It is the most awesome writing program ever.
