Welcome to another post of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG), a network of bloggers who post every first Wednesday of the month about problems in writing and how to solve them. It was founded by blogger/author Alex Cavanaugh. This month it is co-hosted by Lee Lowery, Juneta Key, Yvonne Ventresca, and T. Powell Coltrin. This month’s IWSG writing problem that I’ll discuss here at the Far Out Fantastic Site is how to stay motivated with revising your story.
Even though I’ll read them, I was never a big fan of writing long works of fiction. I am more of a short story writer. However, my current Novella, titled Invasion of the Avatars,that I’m working on is the long work that I’ve stayed with the longest so far. Because I’m ADD, it’s hard for me to stay focused on writing long fiction such as novels. Yet, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing a novel, so one NaNoWriMo, the nationwide novel writing challenge that occurs each November, I compromised with myself and so decided to write a novella. I never finished it. The rough draft that is. Then during the NaNoWriMo of that following year I tried writing another novella, Invasion of the Avatars,and that one I finished. About three months later. Then, so I could get a fresh reading of it, I set it aside for about six months and then took it back out to revise it. I only got about five pages into it before I got bored with the story and determined that I would not be able to stick with revising 80 to 100 pages. So I left it saved and shut it away on my flash drive for good. Or so I thought.
About a year or two later, last NaNoWriMo to be exact, I tried writing another novella. Like the first one, I didn’t finish it. I felt like the story wasn’t going anywhere or maybe going in toomany directions beyond meaning. So I ditched that one, thinking, maybe I should try to resume writing my previous novella. Avatarshad been shut away on the flash drive for at least a year since I first tried revising it. But I pulled it back out and decided to work on it again thinking that if by page five I still felt the same way about it as I had the first time, then I’ll just forget that story permanently. However, by the time I got through page five I wanted to do more. So I printed up five more pages and read over those making revisional comments. I was still enthused about the story during this second attempt at revision. So far I’ve revised 25 pages of Avatars.
Why the sudden change in attitude toward a novella that I thought I would never be able to stick with? I believe it was because I put it aside for a longer period of time than I did after I first wrote it. After that first attempt at revision, I put it aside for at least a year which was double the time span than that from when I had left it aside the first time. And so by this point I could get into the story more because it was like a brave new world to me. I had alienated the story from myself for a longer period. So when I tried reading it over the second time, it was almost as if I had never seen the draft before.
Stephen King says in his memoir, On Writing, that when you take out your manuscript after having kept it in a drawer for several weeks and “if it looks like an alien relic bought at a junk-shop or yard sale where you can hardly remember stopping, you’re ready” to revise it.* In other words, if you hardly recognise your story then you can revise it more objectively and so as if somebody else wrote it. So if you alienate your story from yourself long enough and then finally look at it and the story’s setting, situations and characters appear unfamiliar to you, then you are ready to revise because you will be more intrigued by it as if it was uncharted territory to explore.
How long do you set your first draft of a story aside before you start revising it? Does the story look as if it were written by someone else when you start revising?
Until next time . . .
*Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Pocket Books 2001.
