Revision Season #1
On Scenic Outlooks
Hi Friends!
A hearty welcome to those of you who have arrived via Instagram to hang out with me during this season of revision.
If you’ve been a subscriber for some time, you might be surprised to see me putting out another newsletter so close to the last one—the soon in Talk Soon is usually a bullshit soon, I know, I know! But, you know, it’s the summer solstice today, and much like for most of my youth, I’m inhabiting a certain persona this summer and that persona is Woman Revising Her Novel. (In my 90s youth it was get very tan, convince a certain lifeguard at the pool to talk to me, get taller, make friendship bracelets, hang out at the diner and play the same songs on the little jukeboxes with the same two friends). Much like my adolescent summers, the revision feels all consuming, like my entire personality at the moment. I’m always writing something down or thinking about the book in some way. This level of absorption feels different than with other books. I’m not trying to understand why, just riding this while it lasts. It is a sort of surrender.
So, welcome to Revision Season, an every-other week installment of what the hell is going on with my novel revision. I need someplace to put all this stuff that’s filling my head besides leaving multiple 9-minute Voice Memos to my friend Payton (bless you Payton for listening to all my mini podcasts! You’re still gonna get them!).
Summer has always been about the time outside of of the norm, hasn’t it? About transformation: a push, a change, away from the eyes of the people who see you as a certain you all the time. Showing up at the first day of school in September more in(to?) yourself, somehow. I’m going to do that transformation—or, my book is—in front of you all, sort of. I won’t be sharing a lot of the details of the plot or characters just yet, but if you’re here because you’re a process junkie like me, you should get your fill. For those of you who aren’t writers, this season of newsletters might be in an entirely foreign language, but I hope there’s something to hang onto for you, too. I’ll still do some of the regular stuff: telling you what I’m reading or thinking about otherwise, too.
Will I get my revision done this summer? Honestly, I have no idea. I’m very bad at figuring out how long these things take. You can devote time to things, but you can’t generally rush the writing process. I can read at a certain speed but landing on the right solution to something is not predictable. It’s motivating to try to get this done by August or September but also impossible to say if I will.
I always say that the goal of a revision is to get you to the next draft, and that’s true for me, too. The next draft, whenever it’s done, will go off to my agent (hi Barbara!) and a few trusted early readers and I will do this all again, in a different way. Whatever that next draft needs, I’ll try to give it.
It really is madness.
And I really am excited to do this in this way, and pleased that you’re here with me. This will probably be the longest one of these I do though also who can say how into the weeds I’m gonna take you over these months.
Shall we?
What I’ve Done So Far
1. Took about a month off between finishing the draft and re-opening it. This is essential for returning to the project with fresh eyes, and I’m usually happy to do this, but this round, I hated it. I’m sure I was a miserable person to be around (sorry to my family). In that time I worked on classes and other people’s projects (great!) and tried to revise a short story I thought was close to done (not great!). I uttered the phrase “I miss my novel” aloud, multiple times, which is embarrassing, but also true.
2. Printed the novel, changing the font from the one I work in of course, and read the novel over the course of a few days. I didn’t allow myself to write anything down as I did this, though I did take some notes when I finished, just whatever was floating around. This ranged from big things: digging in deeper on one major character who I can see is the least understood by me, to smaller things, like adding in more detail to another character’s cooking scenes. As an author, reading your own novel as a reader is rare. You only get to do it a handful of times throughout the process, as most of the time you’re looking for a book’s weak spots, ways to strengthen it or unlock something important. But this read as a reader—trying my best to follow the narrative, and to take pleasure in the narrative—it’s so important to reading as its author in order to strengthen it and was…actually…fun. I was so damn pleased (and relieved) to be hooked on my own book, in both plot and emotional arc, and I can’t honestly say I’ve felt that before. When I was finished, I felt really proud of myself, another thing I don’t often have a moment with in writing in a non-intellectual way. So that was nice.
3. Made headings for lists in my writing notebook, to prep for the annotated read. There’s a page for each character, one for secondary characters (I don’t call them minor; I think this is mean but most of all inaccurate), one for logic, structural, arcs/threads, and a miscellaneous one because I definitely can’t anticipate what else I’m going to want to capture.
What I’m Doing Now
Reading and annotating with abandon, filling in those aforementioned lists with potential to-dos. Later, I’ll be more deliberate in what I’m reading for, but now it’s all the notes I didn’t allow myself to take during my first read, everything from small line edits (though I try my best to save these for the last round) to questions to places that need more detail or cuts I’d like to make. I’m moving at the rate of a chapter a day. I have 10 chapters, each somewhere between 40-50 pages (the chapters have 4 sections each, divided between the rotating voices, which I say more about below). I’ve completed annotating 4 chapters as of this writing.
The notes I’ve been making the most are:
TRUE?: Is this thing I wrote about a certain character true, still? In early drafts, I tend to do a version of throwing spaghetti at the wall (I did this once, literally, with spaghetti in high school, in a friend’s kitchen. Apologies to her parents two decades later.). I used to be a really reticent, tight writer, but I’ve found over time it’s much more fruitful to stuff an early draft with anything that might be true. This is also the place where darlings—really punchy or beautiful lines—tend to live/hide out. The question is, do these lines say anything about the actual book and its people? Are they placeholders or just scenic outlooks to an entirely different story? Are they little nuggets of something I need to look at more closely and deepen? Should I push them off the cliff of said scenic outlook?
EH: A Danielle Lazarin classic note to self. It’s a nice way of being like ugh, no, why did you write this no one should ever see these lines ever. These are likely moments that need to be cut, sometimes ratcheted up. They’re often the answer to the above TRUE? question, appearing in a less darling form.
POV: I’m working with essentially 4 points of view in this novel. Three major characters, and a rotating fourth voice. It’s in third person, and the thing I have to be careful about is that the point of view stays close to the character whose section it is. Sometimes, this is a leap too close to what a different character thinks or knows, but just as often, and this is the real no-no, it’s my point of view as an author, the thing I want the reader to get or know, or have carried with me into the story too soon because I know everything. I mean, I don’t, but I know too much about where the book is going and its themes, and I have to keep my nose out of it, or at least keep it all under control. This is hard.
CHOREO: Short for choreography. This my note to strengthen the movements of the scene, its physical beats. Who is where, and how do they get physically from one place to another? How long does it take to say, pick up a chocolate donut from a drive thru and hand it to a child in the backseat, and what can happen in the space of that? I’m always thinking about these beats and the ways bodies and dialogue inhabit them.
What I’ve Learned
Every book should have a spoiler or two. Mine does! This was exciting to note, and to believe it’s where it should be.
Beginning chapters are often the weakest, because if you’re writing the draft in order, more or less, they’re the places where you don’t know enough yet. This can be hard, okay, cringe-inducing to read. But also can feel like the easiest places to fix. It’s funny, too, because most of us spend so much time on these openings trying to get them “right.” I’m pretty sure mine will be completely rewritten, which I would have emphatically denied a few months ago.
Books have their own vocabularies and obsessions and they tell you a lot about the book you are writing and where to pay attention. There are words and phrases I’m using over and over again, that are particular to this book, and I’ll have to do searches to make sure I don’t overuse them. Some of them are: pierce (such a good verb! Still cannot be used 10 times in a single book to describe the way an emotional moment lands), smirk (ugh why), wordless (this is often between the same two characters, and to me, that’s a real placeholder for the way they are in communication with one another), variations on the phrase “the way men imagine themselves” which honestly, would be a good description of a lot of my work and this book specifically and also cannot be used 4-5 times in a single project.
What’s Ahead
Bumps, crises of confidence, despair. It’s bound to happen. I’ll let you know, trust me. My aim is, as you probably know by now, transparency of process. I’ll be on the floor at some point. I always am.
All of the above is an assessing phase so I can make an action plan, which is when the real work begins, which I keep saying to myself, but also what I’m doing now is also very much the real work. Will the action plan be yet another giant list? A reason to color code? A spreadsheet? Stay tuned!
Religion of Office Supplies Report
Currently in the rotation are…
5 pens: 3 microns (blue, green, red) each assigned to specific characters, 1 purple pen for the 4th set of voices, 1 black pen for general notetaking (my final beloved OptiFlow, which I believe is now out of production and I am deeply deeply sad, though I am also having visions of seeing it at Stevdan and might make a trip to confirm such a fever dream?)
Not yet here but, I ordered giant Post-Its because my friend Neela Banerjee told me she uses them during revision and Neela is smart and cool and also revising a novel. Definitely the candidate for office supply I will not know what to do with. I always have to buy something new for a revision. I try and keep it reasonable (these were $11) so I’m not ashamed later when I don’t use them.
I began using tiny page flags to mark redundancies. I ditched those after about a chapter. Also had gathered a bunch of highlighters with my bazillion pens, and ditched those. For now! They’ll reappear.
Where to Find Me
Thus far, my reads have been happening in a specific couch corner, on the other side of the shelf that divides my office space from the rest of the living room (yes, my “office” is in the literal middle of our mostly open plan apartment, but also in NYC, so you know, it’s fine and not fine and also 6 years before my second child goes to college and I can start to occupy the children’s room as my office but I digress into dreams of a room (with a door) of my own). There’s a small blue table where all my pens and notebook live. The dog is usually close, sometimes glaring at me, because it’s usually her corner during the day but hey you gotta be faster than that, June. It’s a nice space. It’s really nice to be away from my desk desk. Great for focus.
Speaking of revision, I’m teaching a one day craft intensive on reverse outlining on Monday, July 17th. I’m not at this stage myself yet—I did it a lot in finishing my last draft though—but I’m certain there is a point where it will come into play. If you’re working on a fiction project (though this method works as well for nonfiction, and I taught it all the time when I worked at a university writing center) and want to learn more about this method, which is truly the most useful revision and maybe writing tool, join me. You’ll need some pages in progress. It’s hands on and applicable to all your projects at various stages. Two hours, $95. Link to enroll here.
Thanks to you and your summer persona for coming along with me on this revision. Will report back in two weeks! If you’re into paper, I do post little snippets of things here and there on Instagram.
Talk Soon,
Danielle