Or maybe real life has shoved your writing aside. But for whatever reason, you've been neglecting them. Now the time has come to blow off the dust and get back to work.
How you begin depends on your
basic approach to writing and whether the novel is a completed or partial
draft.
If it's a partial, and you're a
writer who creates stories without an outline of any kind, you'll probably do
what you did to start with. Sit down and let 'er flow from the blinking
insertion point into blank space.
If the novel is a completed draft, you'll put
on your editing hat and choose to concentrate on content/developmental issues
or line/copy editing based where you think the novel is in the journey toward
prime time.
But if you're a writer who
prefers to work with some form of story map in place, the task with either a
partial or a completed draft is quite different, especially since you have many
more options other than simply to begin writing new content or editing the old.
You're going to think in advance about how best to proceed, and the process
will probably include a detailed evaluation of your existing story strategy and
scene selection, handling of point-of-view, character arcs for the protagonist,
opponent, and major supporting characters, just to name a few of the structural elements of fiction worthy of your attention.
At the risk of offering an
opinion with no way to prove it other than with personal experience, I submit
that most of us make a classic mistake by our failure to recognize what
emergency-room doctors and nurses know full well. It's called triage, and the
medical analogy is absolutely apropos of revising a novel.
I may be speaking only for
myself (but I doubt it) when I say that my first inclination is to line/copy
edit simultaneously with evaluating content and story development. This may not
be a fatal flaw, but it certainly hinders the revision process. To avoid that revolting development of struggling with multiple versions ad infinitum, here are the
proper steps:
1.
Stop the bleeding. Translation: Evaluate the
story from a structural perspective to determine if it works. This is the big
picture, not the tiny thumbnails like where the commas are.
2.
Perform major surgery. Translation: Fix the
structural problems. Excise all the text that fails to support a major
structural element of fiction and stitch the patient back together.
3.
Perform cosmetic surgery. Translation: Make the
happy-for-glad substitutions and tighten the prose by distilling the text into
a richer broth. (Please pardon me for the mixed metaphor, especially two whose
combination is somewhat distasteful . . . and there I go again!)
And just like in the emergency room, failure to follow these steps may result in the death of the patient, or at the very least a prolonged hospital stay.
With two short non-fiction books
recently published, and my commitment to have the second novel in the Pilot Error series on the Austin Indie
Writers' table at the Texas Book Festival in October, the time has come for me
to wipe the dust off Red Line.
We all know how time flies when
we're having fun, so I'd best get to work.
Tosh is the author of the aviation mystery/thriller Pilot Error, the second-in-series Red Line (Fall 2012), and two non-fiction series: Book One of Wings On My Words, tales from the writer's
desk, and Book One of Words On My
Wings, tales from the cockpit. Visit him online at toshmcintosh.com.
