Revising Fiction
I recently embarked on the 6th draft of my novel. I took a brief detour when something–my muse, the devil?–whispered in my inner ear to switch to present tense.
“Present tense is stupid,” pronounced my husband G. Grod when I mentioned this to him. I tried it anyway. It was excruciatingly slow. Normally I am a fast editor, but it took me about six hours to get through fewer than twenty pages. The response of my writing group was not as blunt as G. Grod’s had been, but it was clear they weren’t fans of the change. I promised I’d switch back to past tense. Then one of them said that in a workshop she’d taken, the writer/instructor related that she started each new draft fresh, writing from memory, using her old draft as an occasional guide. I’ve read two books by that author, both of which I admired a great deal. The advice was scary–write it again? When it seems so close to ready to send out?
I’ve given it a shot. The new draft is going much more quickly than did the present-tense debacle, but much more slowly than if I was line-editing my last draft. I’m coming up with some different stuff, though, and I like that I’m unshackled from all those sentences I’ve written. This new draft may take longer than I’d like to produce. Then again, which draft doesn’t?
June 13th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
Plenty of authors do this. David Mamet does this with plays. He’ll do one complete draft, put it in a drawer, then start a new one. The idea is to go back and cover the important things, knowing more now about the overall flow and shape of the piece. After he has two to five versions of the same story, with different approaches to the staging, the dialogue, and the characters, he then combines them — which makes editing more interesting, if more complicated.