YOU CAN'T DO IT WRONG: REVISION
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how you can't draft wrong (piece found here), and this week I thought I would turn to one of the other parts of writing and publishing, and that's revision. Right now I've taken a break from drafting so that I can work on revising and possibly rewriting older projects. The past four or five months have been spent with my going through both projects from start to finish and finding out what needs to be changed, what can be scrapped and what needs to be expanded upon. It's been an eye opener to me as to how I approach revision, and I kinda felt like this piece was also one to write.
See, I always found it hard to both edit and revise. I think it was because I didn't have a set process for it. I always found the editing process hard, and I just much prefer drafting because I kinda know what I'm doing there. But revision is something else entirely. I'll stick to just that rather than editing as well, and probably will talk about that beast next week.
But revision is something that, like drafting, everyone approaches differently. I don't know if it's inherent in how we draft, or whether because the story is told, we're just more able to find a way that works for us when it comes to tightening things up and closing plot holes and the like. My first time revising I struggled to find out what I needed to do and what process I needed to adopt. I'd done self-editing passes, and they seemed to be pretty straight forward, but revision? Nah that was a completely different beast!
So I took advice from this person, read books about it from other writers, and sat down to find my process. I knew that as a mostly pantser, I would probably have a whole lot of threads that were both left dangling or weren't needed any more because they went nowhere and added nothing to the plot. I honestly got caught up in doing things the 'right' way that it kinda overwhelmed me.
There's a lot of ways to do all the things in the creative process, and like I've said before, everyone is different. Everyone has their own way of working, and that's okay. That's normal. That's how it is. But I think the problem comes when people, with large platforms or not, try to give the idea that their way is the only way, and that if you can't or don't work like that, you are wrong, and can't be a writer.
Which, to be frank, is just crap! We all work differently, it's part of the human experience that s really humbling and awesome at the same time. It's normal to do things differently than your peers. It's normal to have a completely different process compared to any other writer. It's okay to approach revision in a way that no one else you know does. That's okay. That's how you work and doing the best for yourself is the right approach. There is little point in twisting yourself into knots trying to work how someone else says is the only right way, when actually it's never going to work for you, because you don't work that way.
We all draft differently. We all write differently. We all revise differently. That's okay. You're not doing it wrong. You're doing it your way, and that's not a bad thing. We all have to find our own way of doing things, and that's okay.
So remember that and remember this: YOU CAN'T REVISE WRONG.
Any questions? Lemme know in the comments!
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