Yesterday I submitted my Personal Narrative (PN) for the Foreign Service Officer process (because I passed the test! YAH!). This involved answering 6 questions in 1300 characters - including spaces. That's not a lot of space to try and convince someone to interview you.
Writing and editing and editing and editing these responses has only solidified my revision process. Even though these were professional and not fictional responses, I approached my answers the same way I approach my short stories and novels.
Disclaimer: this is my process and not necessary yours. Do what works for you.
I only recently discovered my process which is outlined below. I'm pretty good at creating something, but I've always been hesitant at revising. It takes A LOT of time and I didn't like the idea of spending time working on something that has already been completed when I can work on something new.
My opinion on revision has been changing. Especially while working on these short stories I've posted. I've learned that I'm a decent reviser. I'm certainly a better reviser than first drafter, but really that's true for anyone. The quality of work rarely gets worse the more and more you work on it. Best of all, I learned through my short stories that I can finish revising. There is light at the end of the tunnel and I am NOT going to be working on this for the rest of my life. It will be done, it will just take some work.
Also, I should mention that I haven't opened my Arthur story in a while and now that my PN is finished, I should get back to work!
So, without further ado, here is my revision process:
Step 1: Barf it out in one sitting. It really is as simple as that, except you'll need to employ Susan Dennard's BICHOK technique (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard). And that just might be the hardest part. Actually writing it. But once I start writing, I don't stop (except for junk food and petting my cat, the ever precious Freya, of course). And I don't look back. I don't care how awful it is, first drafts are mean to be terrible. I wrote a whole post on this here.
My only goal in this step is to get what's in my head down on paper. I don't care about word counts (or character counts in the case of my PN). I don't care how jumbled everything is. My plot will change, my characters will do things I don't see coming, my outline might come crashing down around me, but I will still keep typing. Because only when I finish something can the actual revision start.
In one of my responses, I ended my first draft at 2400 characters which, for those of you good at math, is over my limit by 1100 characters. From here, I needed to move into...
Step 2: Find the story. I just wrote a lot of jumbled words, but where is the actual story here? This, for me, involves a LOT of outlining and figuring out what needs to be added, deleted, changed, etc. Author's will say that they write a book to discover the plot and that's especially true for me. Sometimes things can surprise you and you need to figure out where it belongs in the course of your story.
Step 3: Organizing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Organizing it crucial to step 2 as well. Except this time, I'm actually organizing my text whereas in step 2, I'm still only organizing ideas. I will go through the text and put the story in the right order. Sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters will move around to make the most sense. This is all about story structure!
Step 4: Getting all the details right. This involves adding AND deleting A LOT. Some scenes aren't needed at all. Some I'm completely missing. Details are added. Actions are nailed-down. Characters are made better. Essentially, this is my perfecting the story phase. This is where all the dirty work happens. And usually, this has to happen multiple times.
I should warn that often times, when I'm revising a first draft, this step involves a lot of re-writing. Which sucks, but in the end, it's ALWAYS better than the original and therefore worth it.
Step 5: Line-edits. I like this phase the most. This is the nit-picky "this word isn't right" part. Or the "You should rearrange this sentence structure" part. The story is there, the details are there. Now you just have to take it from being great, to being perfect. Usually I don't have a lot of major edits in this part, it's just minor changes. Don't get me wrong, there can still be a LOT of changes, but they never seem to affect my story very much, or at all (if it does, then I force myself back to Step 2 because might be wrong with my structure).
So that's it. That's how I've been revising my stories and how I revised my PNs. And unless I find a better method, that's how I'll continue to revise. We'll see how well it worked with my PN's. In the meantime, I think I can hear my Arthur story calling my name...
 |
| Photo Credit: UnSplash |
Disclaimer: this is my process and not necessary yours. Do what works for you.
I only recently discovered my process which is outlined below. I'm pretty good at creating something, but I've always been hesitant at revising. It takes A LOT of time and I didn't like the idea of spending time working on something that has already been completed when I can work on something new.
My opinion on revision has been changing. Especially while working on these short stories I've posted. I've learned that I'm a decent reviser. I'm certainly a better reviser than first drafter, but really that's true for anyone. The quality of work rarely gets worse the more and more you work on it. Best of all, I learned through my short stories that I can finish revising. There is light at the end of the tunnel and I am NOT going to be working on this for the rest of my life. It will be done, it will just take some work.
Also, I should mention that I haven't opened my Arthur story in a while and now that my PN is finished, I should get back to work!
So, without further ado, here is my revision process:
Step 1: Barf it out in one sitting. It really is as simple as that, except you'll need to employ Susan Dennard's BICHOK technique (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard). And that just might be the hardest part. Actually writing it. But once I start writing, I don't stop (except for junk food and petting my cat, the ever precious Freya, of course). And I don't look back. I don't care how awful it is, first drafts are mean to be terrible. I wrote a whole post on this here.
My only goal in this step is to get what's in my head down on paper. I don't care about word counts (or character counts in the case of my PN). I don't care how jumbled everything is. My plot will change, my characters will do things I don't see coming, my outline might come crashing down around me, but I will still keep typing. Because only when I finish something can the actual revision start.
In one of my responses, I ended my first draft at 2400 characters which, for those of you good at math, is over my limit by 1100 characters. From here, I needed to move into...
Step 2: Find the story. I just wrote a lot of jumbled words, but where is the actual story here? This, for me, involves a LOT of outlining and figuring out what needs to be added, deleted, changed, etc. Author's will say that they write a book to discover the plot and that's especially true for me. Sometimes things can surprise you and you need to figure out where it belongs in the course of your story.
Step 3: Organizing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Organizing it crucial to step 2 as well. Except this time, I'm actually organizing my text whereas in step 2, I'm still only organizing ideas. I will go through the text and put the story in the right order. Sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters will move around to make the most sense. This is all about story structure!
Step 4: Getting all the details right. This involves adding AND deleting A LOT. Some scenes aren't needed at all. Some I'm completely missing. Details are added. Actions are nailed-down. Characters are made better. Essentially, this is my perfecting the story phase. This is where all the dirty work happens. And usually, this has to happen multiple times.
I should warn that often times, when I'm revising a first draft, this step involves a lot of re-writing. Which sucks, but in the end, it's ALWAYS better than the original and therefore worth it.
Step 5: Line-edits. I like this phase the most. This is the nit-picky "this word isn't right" part. Or the "You should rearrange this sentence structure" part. The story is there, the details are there. Now you just have to take it from being great, to being perfect. Usually I don't have a lot of major edits in this part, it's just minor changes. Don't get me wrong, there can still be a LOT of changes, but they never seem to affect my story very much, or at all (if it does, then I force myself back to Step 2 because might be wrong with my structure).
So that's it. That's how I've been revising my stories and how I revised my PNs. And unless I find a better method, that's how I'll continue to revise. We'll see how well it worked with my PN's. In the meantime, I think I can hear my Arthur story calling my name...
No comments:
Post a Comment