Revision diary: Rebuilding worlds
This is cross-posted from my Patreon, so apologies if you are seeing this twice! I generally try to keep the two separate, but this seemed relevant to the vibe of COOL STORY, BRO.
Publishing moves slow, and 2020 ensured that it moved slower than usual. This is why, about 11 months after selling the Super Dead Girls novel, I'm just starting to revise it.
I should be clear that this isn't my first time revising this novel. After finishing the first draft in February of 2019, I did two full revisions; once to slap it into shape for my MFA thesis, and then again before going on submission with it in the end of 2019. It was sold in March 2020, and it's been with my editor at Holt since then, until I received her (absolutely genius) feedback last week.
DEFEKT, by contrast, took 10 months from start to finish: idea --> pitch --> revised pitch --> contract --> first draft --> revision + sensitivity read --> second revision --> copyedits --> final pass. And those were pandemic months, simultaneously compressed and dilated in the worst way. Writing on that kind of timeline taught me a lot about how I write; what strengths I rely on, what elements always trip me up (endings! I never get them right on the first try, and rarely right on the second), and what I'm capable of under pressure. First drafts are always a trust-fall exercise; giving up any control over the mess in order to keep up the momentum. No matter how much I outline and plan, I always leave myself a ton of work for my subsequent drafts.
I've seen a lot of writers emphasize the importance of revisions, but very few talking about the actual process of it. Mine looks like this right now:
Bullet points, indecipherable color-coding, attempts at organization, reminders. All of my outlines end up looking like deranged, three-dimensional to-do lists, because my brain chases the little burst of satisfaction that comes in scratching a line through an item. And I sometimes think better in longhand instead of typing, and sometimes it's indescribably helpful to switch colors or highlight things.
The most important thing I end up doing is just free-writing; words that almost never end up in the actual narrative, but are where I figure out character arcs, backstory, and worldbuilding -- especially the last, because I think it's an area where I'm personally weaker. I never flexed it as much as other skills (dialogue, for example, which at least one teacher called my superpower), and that's why a lot of my worldbuilding ends up being called "impressionistic" or "cheerful nonsense" by some critics; it's a creative choice, sure, because I'm also just not as compelled by it unless it's really masterfully done (Fonda Lee's Green Bone Saga comes to mind here, and NK Jemisin's secondary world fantasy) -- but I'm also less skilled at it, and have gotten better and better at coming up with creative ways to disguise that fact.
Impressionistic, sleight-of-hand worldbuilding can get you far in shorter fiction, where readers have less time to linger and go, wait, what the hell? And if I were writing for a different audience with different expectations, a novel built on wispy worldbuilding would still work. Readers of dark YA fantasy, on the other hand? Haha, no.
Free-writing is also important in re-familiarizing myself with what I loved about the story; the stuff that excited me so much that I had to put it down into a narrative. The trick is in tying those two things together; how does the backstory influence a character's arc? How can I make the rules governing [REDACTED SPECULATIVE ELEMENT] a source of horror, or wonder, or both?
I absolutely love hearing about how other writers do revisions, so if you have tips, tricks, or essays or books that dig into this, PLEASE tell me them in the comments! I swear that this is only, like, 25% begging for a distraction from my actual work.
A quick reminder that FINNA, my novella about queer heartbreak, wormholes, and working retail, is eligible for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. Anyone is allowed to vote in the Locus awards, while the Nebs are for SFWA members, and the Hugos are for Worldcon attendees. And if you loved FINNA, please consider pre-ordering its sequel DEFEKT.