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What do a mystery novel draft and the Affordable Care Act have in common? You might give many answers, not all of them snarky. In both writing and health policy, events of the past week and a half set me thinking how a good start is only a start.
The 2017 University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute suggested many rounds of revision in my mystery’s future. I brought home ideas to strengthen character, dialogue, world building, scenes, and word choice. Special thanks to presenters Patricia Skalka (Dave Cubiak Door County mysteries), Kathy Steffen (historical thrillers), Peggy Williams (On the Road mysteries), and Silvia Acevedo (God Awful young adult series). Click on their names for websites and books. Human endeavors are rarely perfect. Recognizing the need to revise can feel overwhelming. I’d rather see room for improvement as cause for celebration, not despair. The opportunity to revise is an invitation to creativity and hope.
10 Comments
Lisa
4/3/2017 11:23:25 am
Sarah, so much like my professional life. Every month the magazines are rewritten. Every year the catalogs are revised, and I/we review how we've described the product in the past, and decide if our presentation can be improved upon. Same thing with product brochures, every couple of years. Menus are revised to better appeal to a new class of diners (not to mention wait staff, as I found out this morning in a meeting with a long-time Madison restaurant owner who is revising not only the content of the menu to bring in some new items and drop some old ones, but also try to achieve a good balance between how much the waitress wants to inform the patron, and how much the patron wants to read for themselves, and how much the cooks want to cook, which is more than the waitress wants to describe and probably more than the patron wants to read, in the dark, in a social setting with friends). Indeed, you can have a perfect product and the rest of the world moves along, so revision is still needed. I'm intrigued by the consideration of how the printed menu needs to meet waitstaff needs. In writing, there's the question of how much the reader wants to be told, or considers irrelevant, or would rather figure out for herself or himself.
Lisa
4/4/2017 09:01:28 am
I'd never thought about the waitstaff's needs before yesterday. Every restaurant would be different that way. A boisterous place where you go to unwind with friends, and where the waiter/waitress would only flit in and out of the party, would benefit from an easy-to-follow printed menu. A more leisurely dining experience would begin with a slow perusal of an elegantly designed menu. And wait staff would enhance that experience by filling in the blanks... or white space.
Lisa
4/3/2017 11:29:32 am
So, I guess, in my business, revision is a given. But you (and my other writer friends) are generally unlikely, with a book, to put out a revision in two years... My clients and I accept that each one is our best effort and that still, there will be changes, sometimes a lot. Sometimes our previous effort is almost unrecognizable. You don't have that benefit. You gotta get it the rightest the first time! Indeed, fiction is almost never revised and nonfiction only rarely. So the revision has to happen before publication (which no doubt happens in your work as well). A book that doesn't yet have a contract needs revision after revision before an agent or editor takes it on, and quite possibly further revisions afterward.
Lisa
4/4/2017 09:12:24 am
The revisions start as soon as the first customer calls with a question on a product which isn't addressed in the catalog. Which is soon after they receive it. The catalog is non-fiction, but it's surprising how many facts can be wrong in the final printed piece, despite careful proofing, not to mention that facts just change. Olds has always considered this variety of sweet corn to be 97 days to maturity, but the parent company considers it to be 95 days, and the parent company's catalog needs to match ours, whether or not it matches the Jungs catalog for the same sweet corn... That gas igniter part has a male connector, not female... Lisa, ah, yes, fiction and nonfiction are not such clear-cut categories. I love your examples of how the facts of nonfiction can change. And fiction can be wrong, historical fiction but other kinds too. If a suspense novel involves climbing a rock, you'd better get your rock-climbing right no matter how fictional the characters.
Lisa
4/5/2017 11:56:14 am
Tee hee. I love that YOU say that fiction and nonfiction are not such clear cut categories. That sure gets both of us off the hook. So, as the rock climber places his hand, he caresses the 50 million-year-old fossils of long-forgotten sea creatures, immortalized in the limestone wall... until a new geologist with more refined tools and methods of analysis decides the fossils are 120 million years old and it's not limestone at all... And a rock-climbing supply company comes out with a revolutionary new, stronger, safer snap, which everyone immediately adopts! Love it! And while the age of the fossils is a simple tweak, the stronger, safer, universally adopted snap totally ruins the murder mechanism of the first draft and requires compete rethinking of the plot, along with a strong temptation to put everything written to date through the shredder.
Lisa
4/5/2017 12:04:39 pm
Job security for me though! You know, revising all the catalogs to swap out the new products! Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin.
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