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Hi, long time lurker, occasional poster here. I wanted to share my experience of the last 18 months, learning how to revise my novel, and hopefully get some replies from other writers who figured out their own process for revising a novel. I know there are a lot of resources and advices for writers on this very topic -- I've read many of them -- but I found when it came to it, I still had to figure out a huge amount for myself, to work out which of the many approaches actually worked for me.
Background: in 2010 I wrote the first 165k word draft of my fantasy novel. After nearly 10 years of numerous failed attempts, that was the first time I'd ever completed a first draft, and I thought I was well on my way.
What followed was 18 long months of trying to revise what I had. At an early stage I lost confidence in my story, and ended up ripping the story and writing apart to try to make it "perfect." I removed entire POV lines, cut scenes I thought might be weak (but which I now think are fine). I cut out most of what I had loved writing in the first place, and that left me increasingly jaded towards the story. I even switched from third person to first, which I don't even like reading most of the time. Revisions to prose began to sound "writerly", because I was obsessing over "improving" the sentence-level stuff. Actually, I wasn't improving it, I was just making it sound more literary, and kind of dry and stilted. For a long time I couldn't understand why I had lost all interest in my book. But, having spent so much time on it, I couldn't bear to abandon it. I was trapped in a kind of hell. Result? Feelings of desperation and depression. And despair.
Recently I went back to the original draft, and made an amazing discovery. Eighteen months on, I love it! Warm characters, a sense of adventure and possibility, and above all FUN.
I then had a flash of insight about how I should revise it, how I should have gone about revising it all along, namely, print out the first draft, and just sort of type it back in, fixing and polishing as I go, but erring very heavily on the side of preserving what's already there. If it works, it stays. That's what I'm doing now. I've rebooted to the original draft, and doing a type-in with fix and polish. Simple, and so far it's working well. Eerily well. I don't know if the finished product will be publishable (I hope so), but I do know it will be finished, which is something I had almost given up hoping for. I guess for me, it's about backing myself and having confidence in that first draft.
The weird thing is, having gone through this process, my self-confidence in relation to my writing is now surging. It's as if realising self-confidence was the underlying problem has allowed me to simply say, "O.K., well, I'll have more confidence in myself, then." And that seems to have dissolved a lot of the blocks I was feeling.
So, yeah. Self-confidence. I think it's a huge part of writing and revising. Love to hear other writers' thoughts on this.
Roger
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