Hey everyone,
I’m excited—the new covers are here! (They’re all the same covers, just with a new author name.)
I showed them to my son who shrugged and said, “cool,” then went back to his video game. I showed them to my husband who shrugged and said, “cool,” then went back to his movie. I showed them to my cat who, well, stared at me and told me to get the hell out of his personal space.
So, anyway, the next step is reading and revising each individual book. All eight of them.
I’m not looking forward to this.
Most writers, and I’m no exception, will have one of two reactions when revisiting work they’ve done years ago. Either they’ll look at it and think they suck and want to throw it in the rubbish and never want to look at it again, let alone republish it. Or, they’ll look at it and think, wow, I’m not as terrible as I thought I was.
See why I’m dreading this?
Still, I’m also excited. I’ve improved as a writer in these last few years, especially since I started writing fiction. I definitely feel like I offer more as a storyteller, and I think working in book-length has made me more confident in holding a reader’s interest. Trusting, that despite the stories I tell, they’ll stick all the way to the end because they know that I’ll have a point and it will be a good one.
(This newsletter is excellent practice for that, by the way. Thank you to those of you who trust me enough to stay to the end.)
The way I approach revision, for any piece of work but I’ll talk about nonfiction for now, is from a macro to a micro level.
First, I look at the book as a whole. Does it hold together as a complete piece of work, or do I need to rearrange chapters and fiddle about with the structure of the entire thing?
Then, I go into each chapter and look at whether it works in that place of the book and whether it feels complete.
Then, once I’m happy with all the thoughts and high-level structure, I’ll go in and fix the syntax, that is, the voice, the style, any humorous stories that are falling flat, any open loops I’ve forgotten to close, etc.
As the last step, I do a grammar and spell check and proofread it myself before I send it off for professional editing.
This style of revision works well because when you go from macro to micro, every change you make is the final one.
If I were to do it the other way, say, change the voice and proofread the first chapter, only to find that actually, I’d like that chapter to be more towards the end and therefore have more of a finality to it, I’d have to go back and do more edits, more rewriting, more proofreading. But if I start at the macro level first, then by the time I’ve come to what I like to call “the prettying phase” of the project, we’re basically done.
Oh, and most important, you need a beverage of some sort while you’re doing this. I often do it with a glass of wine and a cup of tea because a couple of years ago, when I was flying from Delhi to London, I told the flight attendant I couldn’t decide between tea and red wine, and he rolled his eyes in exasperation and said, “Darling, who said you have to choose? Here, take both!” So now I drink both. At the same time.
Happy writing! I’ll be back tomorrow.
Cheers,
Natasha