I Love Revisions

In the last two months or so, I've started beta reading the first 3-6k words of manuscripts for fun. It's something I asked for on TikTok, asking for any genre, any "state" (alpha, beta, etc), and only requiring that they do not provide me with scaffolding: no blurbs, no synopsis--nothing. Sometimes I don't even get a title.

I like to see if the story can tell me what it is, and if I have a sense of where the plot is going by the time we're at word 6000. Though there are exceptions, I do like to gently nudge my writers that I should probably be able to at least guess by then.

I started this exercise because I've discovered that I love revisions. I'm an extremely fast writer--I banged out my first novel in a month and a half and my second in two, so most of the actual writing I do actually gets done during the revision stage. That's when I really get back to the story and uncover what it is.

There's almost always something missing from the first draft. Every writer has their weakness, and mine is withholding and underwriting on the first pass. I recently received an editorial review of my second novel, and my editor listed his number one note for my manuscript as "too much coyness."

After the initial hour-long meltdown I always have when I receive editorial notes, I buckled down and started working. That's when the fun part starts. It's when, I like to say, the book becomes the book. Maybe I'll discover a different theme than the one I thought I was working with, maybe one of the characters I sidelined or underwrote will come into focus. Maybe it'll require things like removing a chapter that was once my favorite. Once I get past that hour-long meltdown, I have no darlings. I enjoy moving, deleting, and shaping.

I also really like how editors leave fingerprints on my work. My agent has never gone in and written anything for me--neither has the editor I just worked on to review my second novel. But their guidance and notes changes the course of the novel, sometimes significantly, and it means they've shaped it in some way. A thing that felt extremely lonely when I first started doing it is actually very collaborative.

But there's always a meltdown when I get my notes, and it lasts exactly one hour.