Save or Delete? Revising and Rewriting

This week started my first intensive week of revision for my manuscript, and while I had definitely anticipated this time for quite a while, I didn't fully know what to expect. Just as each project is different, so, too, is the revision process. Sometimes you start in the beginning and work your way through, while other times you might work backwards or pick a certain element to revise throughout your work. For this initial revision, I am focusing on the first third of the novel: tightening, cutting, and just getting to the main action of the novel sooner. I've also been adding a few scenes, too.  

One of the best pieces of advice my mentor gave me was that my reader is more interested in seeing the interactions between the kids as opposed to the interactions between my protagonist and the adults around him. From this, I’ve been able to reconceptualize just what are the most interesting scenes in the first third of the novel, and what might come off as a little less interesting. 

But in all of this, I've found myself asking the question, "Should I cut this? Or should I keep it?" I've definitely cut a lot of material — entire scenes even. Despite the initial feeling that I had worked so hard on these scenes and conceptualized the story so specifically, I really find the deletion process pretty easy. I'm ruthless, you might say. So far I've cut out about forty-five pages out of entire manuscript. But when it comes to material that isn't part of a strictly prolonged child-to-adult scene, or backstory that we don't actually have to see playing out, the line between what should be saved and what should be thrown out becomes a bit more blurry. What happens to those really great sentences that just don’t seem to fit in anymore? And the piece of dialogue that is so great but needs to be changed based on the changes to the scene above? 

Most of the time the answer is that I have to let them go. Maybe try to store them in the back of my brain for another time. But sometimes, I’ve found ways to repurpose ideas, moving a snippet of dialogue down into the next scene, or simply reorganizing paragraphs to make things work. Knowing when and what to delete or keep is really a case by case call that only you, the author, can make. There is no rule or equation that gives us all the right answers or even a guarantee that this new way of writing a scene was better than the old. 

In determining exactly what material to delete, I think an important step in the process is first deciding how you want the story to read, and exactly what element of revision you are going to work on first. For example, in my revisions, I am really trying to streamline the action and plunge the reader right into the heart of the conflict. So I’ve taken out a lot of exposition that led up to this conflict. If I hadn’t know exactly what my goal for the revision was, it would have been a lot harder to make the necessary judgment call.  Going in with a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish can help tremendously.

Luckily this also isn’t the only revision pass I’ll do. So I don’t have to feel that this is my only chance.  If I don’t make it perfect this time, there are still plenty of opportunities to work on it. Trying to tackle every revision element at once becomes way too overwhelming anyway. But I also make sure to keep a copy of the previous draft, so that in the event that I cut something that I might want to bring back later, I have it saved, and ready to go. 

So for this revision period, I just need to keep my goals in mind and keep crossing things off my list. With one week left before I turn my manuscript back over to my editor, I feel like I'm in an okay place, though there is still a lot left to be done. Hopefully I can achieve all the things on my list this time, and make a whole different one the next! 

I'm off to go work now. Happy writing!