How do you revise a novel?

Simple answer: One word at a time.

I have a novel I finished writing months ago – okay, maybe it was a year ago. In fact, I got it back from an editor just about one year ago. I recall really wanting to get it back from the editor. She’s had it for a couple months and did a line-by-line edit with suggestions and comments.

Finally it came. I looked at the edits, well, some of them, and then I promptly put the novel away and went on to other things. For some reason I just could not face the task of editing this book I had worked on for such a long time.

It wasn’t that the editor’s comments were harsh or that she said the story was garbage. In fact, she said the story had potential, but it needed clean up and refinement. Okay, but then I just could not bring myself to deal with it. I’m really not sure why. Perhaps it was that I thought the damn thing was pretty good the way it was written, or more likely, I felt that it just wasn’t good at all and the effort was wasted energy.

But the other day something shifted for me.

I started a new project to minimize the junk in my life and started cleaning up my office. Of course, one of the things I located was a printed copy of my novel. I picked it up and glanced through the pages and thought, You know, this is not half bad. Then I thought, I need to revise this.

A writer friend of mine, Sara King, just finished a novel called, Alaskan Fire. When Sara was finishing the first draft of the novel she lamented trying to write a “sex scene” at the end of the novel. She tried several approaches and she was struggling. I made the flippant suggestion, “You know, sometimes the best sex scene is NO sex scene.” I was trying to be amusing, really. But Sara had an ah-ha moment and realized she’d already finished the novel twenty pages earlier and there was no need to force a sex scene between the two main characters.

Of course, knowing Sara, the characters did have sex off camera so to speak (really wild sex), or that may be the way the sequel, Alaskan Fate opens.

Sorry about the tangent. Anyway, when I was looking at the 300 pages of my manuscript and the editorial notes, I started thinking, What if I cut the first 50 pages and started with the confrontation between my two main characters in the meadow?

Booya! Suddenly I was un-stuck. I started seeing all kinds of possibilities.

The bottom line: Getting un-stuck is easy. It just takes a year or so of doing nothing and then a zen-like epiphany when you are trying to be funny at another writer’s expense.

Simple.

Finding time to write is often cited as a problem by budding writers. Many people with a desire to write don’t have the time they would like to have for various reasons. It may be work, family, or a number of other life events that get in the way. But even people who seemingly have an abundance of time still complain they do not have time to focus on writing.

I’d like to make the argument here that perhaps it is not the actual “time” the writer needs to locate, but rather the “intention” to write that a writer needs to come up with. What I am saying here is that writing can be done in small chunks, five minutes here, half an hour there, but in most cases a writer won’t use these daily moments to advance a story, poem or essay. These non-writing writers believe they need some special time, perhaps an extended period of time, in order to write something meaningful. While I totally understand this desire, I also advocate trying to keep a piece of writing progressing even if you only have a few minutes at various times during the day.

The key point is not just finding time, but finding “intent”. Finding the intention or intent to write is probably more important than finding time. If you have the intent you will be thinking of your story, making notes, carrying crumpled pages around and jotting ideas and sentences down during the day. As Philip Roth once said about constructing his novels, he concerns himself with the sentence, the paragraph, the page. I think what Roth was getting at was building a story one word and sentence at a time.

Yes, having uninterrupted time to write is a blessing, but having the intention to write is the magic-fairy-dust that can make your writing dreams become real.

Writing is something I love to do so it should be easy, right? Truthfully, sometimes it is, but often I find writing something of value difficult.

Why is this the case?

One thing that makes writing hard is a lack of focus. For instance, you just have no clear idea of what you are writing. Sure, it is easy to sit down with your journal or laptop and write thoughts and feelings, but often you end up with something that may have some meaning for you, but would be garbage for a reader.

Now I do not say that free-form journaling is bad. It has value. But if you have a desire to write stories or articles it just is not helpful.

The biggest difference between a professional writer and a wanna-be writer is clarity and steadiness. You might also say focus and determination, or use other terms, but the key point is knowing what you are trying to produce and then having the stick-to-it-ness to plant your butt in a chair and write. Just wanting to write a novel is not going to get you anywhere. You actually have to put the time in writing.

I suppose that is the benefit of writing workshops and MFA programs. They provide structure and role-models who have figured out how to actually produce readable work. Do you need these type of programs to become a writer? Some people do, some don’t. The key here is knowing where you are personally.

If you really want to write professionally you have to put in the time practicing your craft and art. Sit down with a goal to write an essay or a short story or a scene from your novel. Understand that this is not journaling time or surfing the internet time, but professional writing time. If you can really get the whole work-ethic thing when it comes to writing, really understand where you are and what you are trying to produce in a given writing session, you are half way home. Now, you just have to write.