Ep. 177: How to do Revision Passes to Save Your Sanity

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90 Days to Done

90 Day Revision

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 Patreons. If you’d like me to be your mini coach for less than a large mocha Frappuccino, you can join too at www.patreon.com/rachael

Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #177 of “How do you Write?” This is a mini episode, so no interviewee, just me talking about some stuff right here. I’ve got a couple of questions to answer and I’m very excited to do that. 

[00:00:31] First of all, I must say that revision is divine and I rest in that divinity. I’m loving it so much. The book basically is done with the big major revision. I always leave the very, very last scene or the epilogue to write later, and I will probably write that tomorrow and it’s not due until next Wednesday. So then I’ve got another four or five days to play with some passes at this revision and that was actually one of the things that a bunch of you asked, said that you would like to hear a little bit more about. So I’m going to talk about that right now, and then we’ll go into a couple of other things. 

[00:01:18] But for me, so revision when I’m talking about it, revision is a scary word, and you know that, you’ve heard that, you feel that. If you have a book or if you’re in the middle of writing a book and you’ve never done revision, it feels terrifying. How can you take a book apart and put it back together again? How can you even see what is wrong with the book? Because it’s hard dizzy when you’re inside the middle of the book. So for actual details on how to do the first big, take apart put back together revision, there’s a whole episode for you, my friends, How Do You Write episode number 108; it’s the audio chapter from Fast Draft Your Memoir, it’s everything I know about revision, put together in a very, very small, tight space. So I won’t go into that here, but, what I do for a book like this that is contracted, so I have an editor already. I don’t have to go find one and hire one, like I would if I were self-publishing this. This one is contracted to Penguin Dutton and my editor is going to read it and she’s going to help me with it. So I do not have to pass to her, perfect, polished, ready for publication draft. And here’s why, I couldn’t write it. I could not write that. No one has laid eyes on this manuscript. Except me, no one. And not one single one of us, no matter how many revisions we do on a book, we cannot see our failures, our flaws, the places where we dropped the narrative where the story doesn’t make sense, where the character acts completely out of their character. We can’t see it because we built it. We will never be able to see that. We must have editors to help us. 

[00:03:05] So I’ve done my first big pull apart-put back together draft, we called that the make sense draft. That’s the biggest, hardest draft and now I want to talk to you a little bit about the passes that I’m going to do before I send it to her and I could do passes usually throughout a whole book, you know, in a couple of hours for each pass.  I will also do a bigger pass, before I sent it to her also, which is really looking at each scene to see if I can make it cleaner, sharper, crisper, more beautiful, more lyrical. I can clean up some of the language. I don’t want to make a totally perfect, like I said, because she may come back to me and say, wow, that entire story, that subplot needs to be lifted out. It doesn’t work at all in this book. And that would be hard for me to do if I loved every single scene. I want to leave a little bit of room for my editor to do her job. That’s what she loves to do. So it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be as good as I can get it at this point. 

[00:04:07] So, the little passes that are going to do, not that lyrical pass, but the little passes I’m going to do, they really depend on the book and what the book needs. So I’ve been keeping track of all my post-it’s as I go, you know me and post its. I have a page right here in my book. These- if you’re watching me on the video, it’s probably 10, 14 post-it’s that have not been solved with the make sense draft. They are things that I need to go back through another full pass and make sure is in there. Like this is a big one, she needs to doubt herself as a mother because of her own mom. I know that my main character needs to doubt herself as a mother because of the damage her own mom inflicted on her. I know that in my heart, that’s where her character motivation is. I also know as a writer, I have not seeded that in enough. I need to go drop a couple of more instances. It might just be, four to eight sentences that I add throughout the book. Maybe 12 sentences, maybe a couple of paragraphs. It doesn’t need to be much, but it has to be in there for this book to make sense. So as I’m doing revision, the big make sense revision, I won’t always go back actually, I usually never do, go back and fix things as I think of them, that are in the past in the book, I put a post-it and then I’m going to fix it. So that’s the past is fixing all of these post-its, and then I keep another little tiny pile of post-its, which are for the fast passes. These are things I don’t worry about at all in the first draft. My main character for this book, Jillian, she’s very helpful. That is a strength of hers, and it is also her flaw. She believes that she could only be loved if she is helpful. She’s helping, and so you know those people. I’ve been that person. It’s super annoying. Those people are awful. So she’s going to eight- every single chapter is going to begin with a helpful text that she has sent someone helping them. I haven’t written any of those texts. Those are all going to be written in about an hour. I’ll write a text for each chapter, I’ll kind of link it to the chapter somehow she’s sending them to her friends, to her patients, to whatever. I’ll figure that out. 

[00:06:14] I have one called settings pass. I just hate settings. So I do it in one fell swoop, I’ll take an hour and a half to go into each scene and make sure I have at least a couple of three sentences describing where they are. I get in as late as I can with that, and I get out as early as I can. I do as little as possible. I’m not a visual person. If I tried to force it, it reads as force, but we really need to know where they are and what it looks like around them. So I’ll do that altogether. Here’s a- here’s a more complex, post-it, but just cause it’s got a lot of words on it. It says add visceral to others. So I’m pretty good when I’m writing, I know this about myself, that when a character is feeling something, I give them a visceral feeling inside the body, which shows their emotion in a much deeper and more resonant way than saying she felt sad or she felt scared. I don’t want to say she feels scared. I want to say that, her hands get clammy and there’s ice in her veins, but I’m going to say it in a more creative way than just pulling it out of my head right now. But this is actually something different. I know I do that on a first draft very well. I do it in the second draft pretty well. I add those things, but what I don’t ever do is, sometimes other characters that our main character is watching, will be having emotions and we can clue our readers in by giving them physical act, physical motions that give clues to those characters.

[00:07:49] Internal emotions. I love, you’ve heard me talk about this before, I love the Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becky something. Go buy it. It gives you all of these things, and we don’t copy it word for word. It’s not a cheat, but you lift out, you go, Oh right. People do- I’m doing it on the camera, people do put their fingers on their chins or near their mouth while they’re thinking, right. I’m going to show that, and my reader will understand that that character, that my main character is looking at is pensive, is thinking, so that’s a pass I’m going to add a few of those. They’ll have to do a lot of that. I’m going to, here’s, here’s a pass as much like the setting pass, this is a person description pass. I just need to make sure that every single person in the book is described in two or three very clear and unique sentences. What they look like, not brown hair, blue eyes, and nobody’s going to remember that, nobody cares. But, what does their body look like? How do they hold themselves? What kind of clothes do they always wear or do they, does their perfume reach the room six feet before they do those kinds of things? So that when the reader reads that person later, they will remember something very big and complex about them and kind of gives them a short hand to know this character. Haven’t edit, any of that yet. That’ll take an hour. This’ll take 15 minutes. I just need to change the cars, they own two nice cars because the only nice car I know in my head is like Mercedes and Cadillac. I don’t have anything else and these people are rich, so I need to figure that out. Those are a couple of the little passes that I will do next week before I send this to my editor. 

[00:09:28] So what else did I want to tell you about that? Oh yeah! So Mariah, here’s a question, is awesome. I had tweeted last week, about skeleton-ing scenes. Sometimes when I’m writing a first draft, I will skeleton a scene, sometimes when I’m writing this, when I’m doing the revision, I’ll skeleton a scene if I am not quite in the feeling of writing it out. The thing I use skeletons, and I’ll explain that what that means, the thing I use skeletons for most is when I sit down to write a scene from scratch, first draft, I skeleton it out first. I just put a few beats of what’s going to come in that scene. Kind of like my, my glimpse into it. So this is what Mariah says. That’s- she’s talking about the tweet that was so inspiring. You mean I’m allowed to do that? Just plunk down on words like physical sensation here and move on. I’d love it if you could talk about this process in the mini episode. Since now I realize I don’t have a clue about what it means in practice when you say, write a bad draft. I really hit me morale. I’m always talking about writing a crappy first draft and I don’t show what I mean. So I really appreciate you asking this. She goes on seeing that one tweet makes me think it’s not so much writing the ugly wrong words, as rapidly putting down the first incomplete glimpses into all the scenes. Sort of like very rough storyboards or something. But tell me more about it. Exactly, Mariah. Except I will add that I also write scenes with the wrong ugly words that are just awkward and fast and repeat the same words 12 different times. Like I have those scenes also, but what I do when I sit down to write, a first draft of a scene, I skeleton it out. And what I mean by that, I’m just going to read you one that I shared with my students in the 90 Days class. 

[00:11:24] This is a whole scene right here. It’s told with a first person narrator; I took a nap. Maggie comes by. I’m really good at the internet. I just finished baking brownies. What do you want? Someday I want Isabella to know me and my daughter. Then you’d better make friends with Lucy. In Lucy’s kitchen. Talk about the gifts and her offense at them. Back home house is ransacked. That makes sense to nobody but me, but in it, I know exactly all of the beats of action that I want to happen in there. And I understand implicitly the emotion underneath them. If I didn’t understand the emotion, I would leave myself a couple of clues as to that. That scene fleshed out, will probably be, I mean, I think it turned out to be, I thought it was going to be about 2000 words. I think it turned into more like 2,500 words, but that was the whole skeleton of the scene. If I skeleton it out before I first draft, I am much faster at writing that first draft scene. I got that tip from my name doppelganger, Rachael Aaron, grew up to 2K to 10K. That was her biggest tip that helped me. 

[00:12:33] However, sometimes, and this is kind of what I’ve been referencing, is that I get to a scene and I skeleton it and I’m just not sure, I’m just not sure. I feel it. Maybe I’m tired, maybe I’m fighting a migraine. Maybe I can’t quite bear the emotion that is in there and I’ll make the decision to go onto the next scene. Leaving that skeleton in place, knowing that either I’m going to expand it in my first big revision or I’m going to move it or take it out. Oftentimes when I get to the very end of a book, like this particular book, I had not written the very last scene. I had just skeleton it out because I couldn’t bear to not be done with that book. I skeleton it out and then I wrote the end and then I took the weekend off. Because that’s what I needed to do, emotionally, skeleton-ing really; I know that’s not a verb, but it should be. It really helps take care of me while I’m writing. So those are some of the things that I do in and around my revision process. Yes, write terrible, ugly, crappy first draft words. Also, if you need to cheat to get to the end, it’s not cheating. No one is going to accidentally publish your book with a skeleton draft or write in the middle of it, nobody will understand. It’s not going to run out and just jump up onto the shelves of Barnes and Noble. You’re going to have to deal with that scene at some point. You’re just putting a marker and saying, this is kind of what I feel like it’s going to be, I don’t know. I’m either going to write it now or later. I’m not going to deal with it right now though. So feel free to do that. 

[00:14:05] In my 90 Days to done class, I never tell them about this process at the beginning of 90 days to done, I normally drop it in in the third month when they’re like, I’m never going to finish! I’ve got 24 more scenes, and I’m like, well skeleton 19 of them then. Like write them out, write what you want to have happened in them. It’s still a skeleton draft. It’s still first drafting. It’s just not very complete. You can still make it to the end all the way by doing this. God knows I’ve done that.

[00:14:35] So what else did I want to talk about? Oh, here’s something that is brand new. I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes. Number one, because, my number one got a lot of number one, my number one motivation in my job is to write books that make people feel something that, makes me connect with them. That is my job as a writer. My number two biggest joy is helping writers, write, you know that. That’s why this podcast is on the air. That’s why hopefully you’re listening and I want to do a little bit more of that. And something that I’ve been having fun with in the last few months is, the Tuesday morning write-in, where people come and we write together for two hours, and it’s hella early in on the West coast. We do it five to seven in the morning on Tuesdays. So I’m opening a new slot because I want to open this and make it bigger. I want to make it into an accountability group because I realize that people before they have book contracts or before they, you know, hire their editor and give themselves a, a real true deadline. It’s very hard to finish books. So I was going to try to start this whole business of being like a deadline bitch. And collecting people’s money and giving it to their anti-charities of choice if they don’t finish their books. And then I was like, number one, I’m not a bitch. I can’t be. I’m a cheerleader. That is, it’s in my DNA. I was never a cheerleader in high school ‘cause I was not popular and I was a big nerd.  But I’m a cheerleader in my soul for writers, so I can’t be a deadline bitch. But what I can do is help with accountability.

[00:16:25] So that’s what this is going to be. It’s not going to be the write-ins anymore. It’s going to be called Rachael Says Write. And Rachael Says Write, is going to be a group that, we are going to write Tuesday mornings if you want to, from five to seven Pacific standard time, or 8 to 10:00 AM Eastern standard time. This slot works really well for the Europeans because it’s in the afternoon for them, but I’m opening another slot that might make it more accessible to a lot of you. That’ll be Thursdays, a 4 to 6:00 PM Pacific standard time. So that’s 7 to ni9ne Eastern time. New Zealanders and Australians, this might work for you. So it’s going to be two sessions a week, for two hours each and basically what happens is we get together, you set your goals, you’re going to put them in chat and like we are going to know your goals. This is how it’s changing. If you’re already in this group with me, this is how it’s changing. Each week you will come and put in the chat what you’re working on and what your goal is. I’m working on a novel and I want it finished by November 1st whatever your goal is, I’m working on an essay and I need to be done by Tuesday. You put it in the chat. We all witnessed that and then we work for two hours together on zoom. It sounds weird if you’ve never done it, it is the most heartening, inspiring, lovely thing to do. Sometimes I just sneak over and look at people just to see it, cause they’ve all got their writer faces on. I was killing, I was trying to kill somebody in a manuscript the other morning and I glanced at myself and my face was like in killing mode. It was crazy. But nobody’s looking at you except for me because sometimes I sneak a peek. Nobody’s looking, we’re writing together. You’re working on your document. You got your headphones in. You can hear me when I say it’s time to take a break and you can hear me when we’re done. If you need any kind of writing prompt, I can help you with that too. But what this is really going to be is Rachael Says Write, accountability you show up week after week and we work together. So we actually work together. I am also writing with you. 

[00:18:24] So that’s going to be four hours a week. If you sign up for Rachael Says Write, it’s going to be $39 a month, that’s 16 hours a week. You can be writing with friends, finding your community and actually writing with people. So that’s like two bucks an hour. So I think that’s kind of worth it. I think that if you have any interest in trying this, especially while you might have a little bit more time for writing right now, you might not, Covid might not have, affected you that way. Sorry, my little dog is making lots of noise behind me. But think about that. You can just go to rachaelherron.com/write  for, and then look for on the page rachaelsayswrite and try it out. You can come to two hours a week. You can come to four hours a week and come to every single hour that I offer during the month for the $39. So I don’t know, I think it’s going to be super fun. We’ll give it a shot and I would love it if you came along and try it too. 

[00:19:20] Just to note to people who already signed up for my 90 Days classes starting in May, this will be free to you. This is also a new thing where you can come and write during those 16 hours and you can write on what you’re working in class, that’ll be free to you if you’re in 90 Days Done. 90 Days to Done still has like four slots and, 90 Day Revision has, I think, two or three slots. It’s actually selling out more quickly than 90 Days to Done, first time has done that. You can still join us there. Again, go to rachaelherron.com/write if you’re interested in any of these things.

[00:19:54] Just another tiny little bit of business, I just want to thank new patrons. Katie Forrest, who was on the show last week, got a huge response to her book, Time Management for Writers. Thanks Katie! and new patron, Tenisha Dezrine, thank you. Thank you, Tanisha. And to new patron, Azadey Tataiona. No, wait, I’m going to try that again, Azadey Tataioney, thank you, thank you. Thank you to new and current patrons. It really makes the difference in me being able to sit here and talk to you about these things on the big full interview episodes and also on these mini episodes, which I really love doing. 

[00:20:30] So thank you all! Happy writing. I hope you are getting some of your own work done. Come tell me about it, howdoyouwrite.net or rachaelherron.com or anywhere you can find me. Now I’m going to go collapse ‘cause I’ve spent about nine hours revising today and my brain is toast, but it feels good. It feels god toast. Tasty toast. All right ya’ll, I’ll talk to you soon. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.