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When Your Work in Progress Needs Early Revisions
By
Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
As I mentioned last week, I recently
turned in a teaser chapter and an outline to one of my Penguin editors. This particular editor likes to see an
outline before a book is written.
The deadline for the outline was actually
Sept. 1. The deadline for the book
itself is January 1. I have a self-pub
project that I stopped working on to write this book, so I decided to go ahead
and start writing the Penguin book while I waited for feedback on the outline. There’s a bit of risk in doing so, since it
means that I might need to make big changes on a work-in-progress.
And…I did end up needing to make those
changes. The editor liked the concept
for the book, but thought the set-up in the first chapter was a bit too similar
to the one in Knot What it Seams, which
came out in February.
My editor’s memory is flawless and mine
is faulty. Although that book came out
in February, I’d written it in early 2012 and had written 4.5 books since then
(including the quickly deserted self-pub I dropped to
work on this project). I re-read the start of the story in question and did
notice similarities.
My editor asked for two more suspects, or
at least one more. She also asked for me to include subplots
involving 3 characters she really enjoys and feels that readers also enjoy.
While these weren’t radical changes, they
were fairly substantial and would definitely require a rewrite of the teaser
chapter I’d just turned in.
I was also already 38 pages into the
book.
I started out by making a list. This
keeps me from being completely overwhelmed by the task ahead.
Brainstorm
new direction: Who might work as
additional suspects? I came up with as many scenarios as I could, and then
picked the strongest. How could I
connect the requested subplots in with the mystery? With the other subplot? How could I make those characters grow or
change in the process? What was another
way to start out the book…could I skip the set-up altogether and go right into
the action? I picked the best ideas and dumped the rest.
Revise
teaser chapter: This had to be
revised first, since it was technically overdue.
Revise
outline: Incorporate the
additions in the outline (the additional suspects, the additional subplots).
Delete portions of the outline that no
longer fit in with the revisions.
Make notes
on manuscript: Obviously, I was
going to immediately rewrite chapter one because of the teaser chapter
issue. Then I needed to replace the
original chapter one with the new one.
Make a note to myself on Word in Track
Changes that page 12ish—38 were unedited.
Keep
moving forward with story: For me, I do major revisions after the first
draft is finished. So I picked up on
page 38 with the changes from that point forward, following the revised outline
and the point that I was in with the story.
Others, I know, want to fix those other pages in between, but that’s
what my second draft is for.
So I quickly revised the first chapter
and sent it back to my editor, since she needed it for the end of the December
book. I finished the other tasks and am
now picking up with the story as if the beginning of the book were already
fixed.
So…yeah, it can be a little unnerving to
get requests from changes from an editor in midstream. It might not even be an editor—it could be a
first reader or a critique group. But by
breaking it down into small tasks and prioritizing them, it does make the job a
lot easier.
Have you ever made large revisions in the
early stages of a project? How did you
organize the process?
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