13 Ways of Looking at the Novel: Part Eleven

11.  As a merciless text.

A novel is created through revision.  Your book will never be perfect, but it must be as perfect as you can make it. 

Some suggest just write through to the end—just go, go, go—and then come back and revise.

Others revise as they go.  Yesterday’s page is perfected before moving on to today’s problem.

I write my first draft by hand and type it on the word processor as I go.  In the course of keying in the text, I make small changes.  If I get stuck in the course of things, I may go back and revise from the beginning, but generally I charge forward.  When it comes to revising, I have a trick, and I think it may be the most useful thing I could say to another writer.

My trick is to change fonts and paragraphing.  Use the computer to go from Garamond 12 double-spaced to Arial 11 spaced 1.5 lines, and suddenly the whole text becomes new.  I then print that out and work on it, transferring the edits on paper back to my master copy (which I have switched back to regular type).  Each time I revise the whole thing, I used another type treatment.

I tend to revise in two stages:

—what are the structural/plot/characterization issues
—what are the language issues

And then before sending it off, I look again at the whole —chapters, scene breaks, paragraph size and shape, sentences, and the mixture of narrative to dialogue.  If parts don’t work, one must be merciless, murdering the thing we love for the sake of the book.

It also helps to let the manuscript sit in the drawer, forget about it, and then come back with a clear head and sharp eye.