Last post I talked about first drafts. Now, back to revisions.
Breaks are good.
The break between finishing the first draft of Imogen & Finn's story and revising it was probably essential. Getting into the heads of Audrey and Theo for a few months was good, both in its own right, since Audrey and Theo are lovely characters, and as a way of more clearly seeing who Imogen and Finn are by being able to contrast them with people they're not.
And really "break" is a bit of a loose term. For starters, Imogen and Finn are both in Audrey & Theo's story. But I also would go back and reread bits of Imogen & Finn's story because I just like reading my own stuff. (A complete reversal from where I mentioned being in college. What's funny is I forgot how much I hated rereading my writing back then until I started that post.)
I have a strong feeling that I will be needing another break after I'm done with the first round of revisions. I probably shouldn't speak in definitive terms just yet, but I feel absolutely certain that I will not want to revise Audrey & Theo right away. I think I'll need a break from any kind of revisions. Hopefully, that means jumping back into Emmie & Brody but who knows. It breaks my heart to suggest that I'll need a break from Nerd-Do-Wells entirely, but I might. We'll see.
Drafts are drafts, revisions are revisions.
Similar to being able to know Imogen and Finn better by writing other characters, I think revising reinforces what I've learned to be my process for writing first drafts. Drafts are so much about blind faith, at least for me as I am not a plotter, and that was hard to trust and adjust to. I wanted to try and think about big picture things and get them all perfect and I continuously had to tell myself Not yet.
And hey--I was right. All the things that I was thinking I wanted to tackle while drafting, I finally feel in the right headspace for now.
Yet still so much to learn.
Revising clarifies the drafting process, but I don't think I'm going to have a great idea of revising until I'm doing additional rounds of revisions.
There's so much to consider when revising: plot arcs (at the story and episode level), emotional arcs (at the story and episode level), consistency in character voice and behavior, distinct voices for each POV character, typos, sentence structure and flow, world-building, research. I'm trying to look at all of it now, but I'm not sure if that's the best way to go about it. I'm not sure yet what method works best for me.
But I'm optimistic that round one revisions will crystalize once I'm at round two.
The forest and the trees.
When I started Imogen & Finn's story, I figured it would be a novel, so I wrote it largely with that in mind. Still, I mentally would break it down into sections and that's how I organized it, first in Bear and then Scrivener.
By the time I was drafting Audrey & Theo's story, I realized that a novel wasn't quite the right fit for these stories. Something serialized would give everyone the time they needed to get through all the things they had to get through.
That means part of revisions has become looking at each episode and seeing how the chapters in it work to create their own smaller arc within the broader arc of the entire story. And that means that I'll end up spending weeks on a single episode which, it turns out, can really warp my perception of the big picture.
I'm continually rereading everything up to where I've gotten just to give myself the context I start to lose sight of. But now that I'm five episodes in (which is about 53k words at the moment), that becomes a longer and longer process. What I often end up doing is printing off just Imogen's chapters or just Finn's chapters so I can see where they've been emotionally to make sense of where they are now and where they're headed.
Writing is revising and revising is writing.
I knew going into revisions that I'd be writing new material in addition to simply editing, mainly because there are these huge gaps at the end where chapters consist of notes to myself like "Insert chapter here."
But I'm writing so much for the beginning as well, sections that I had thought were pretty solid initially. My first draft was a little under 79K. My current draft is now over 103K and, as mentioned, I'm probably roughly a third of the way through the story. It shall be a behemoth when it's finished.
I don't think that's a bad thing by any stretch. Both the behemoth part and the doing lots of writing during revisions part. I finished my first draft without a clear understanding of Finn's internal struggle, so this has been my opportunity to get to know him better. And most importantly, the thing I keep saying over and over: Imogen and Finn need time. I was rushing them before, but this is a story about two people finding their way and I want to let them find it. So, really, it shouldn't be surprising at all that I've written so much more.
Revisions: the most extreme form of edging imaginable.
Imogen & Finn is very much a slow burn romance (Imogen, bless her, does not move at speed). But dear god does it feel like an eternity at the pace I'm going. I know they'll get together but I still find myself thinking "Just have sex already!" I actually keep writing additional sex scenes just to maintain my sanity. No idea right now if any of them will make it to the final version (I hope at least some of them do!), but it's a good outlet.
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