Writing new words versus revising

Just offhand, I'd say revising is where you really learn your craft.

As to your process -- if it produces novels that are well written and pleasing to you, then why fix what isn't broken? In the end, only the results matter, not how you got there.

Revising helps me figure out where I want to go sometimes. When I'm stuck, I go revise, and that gets me back into the story and helps me clean up the crap also.

As others have said, revising is a necessary part of the craft. The odds of you getting the story out right perfectly the first time are exceptionally low.

The trick is to figure out when you're revising for the sake of the story or when you're revising to procrastinate. The former is part of the process. The latter's just a merry-go-round: you sit on a pretty horse and feel like you're riding hard, but you're really just going around in circles and you know it.

Not that I've, um, ever revised just to procrastinate...

A writer has to have the skill to recognize when it's best to revise and when it's best to re-write. And that skill comes from experience and experimentation. Both revising and re-writing are necessary tools in a writer's editing toolbox and neither is better than the other in terms of improving in the writing craft. We all need more and more practice in both.

Hmm. Wonder what you mean. My revision is new words. I write a draft on paper, constructing everything carefully as I go. I take notes when there are things that need to be, for example, added to the text to clarify. I write a synopsis as I go and when I'm done I review everything, look at the big story structure and then I type it into the computer, as much as possible without looking at my original draft. So that's both revising and new words.

Layla Nahar said:

Hmm. Wonder what you mean. My revision is new words.

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Good point. Revising usually includes writing lots of new words. Or it does for me.

BethS said:

Just offhand, I'd say revising is where you really learn your craft.

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BethS said:

Good point. Revising usually includes writing lots of new words. Or it does for me.

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I agree 100% with these two statements. The most important words are written while revising.

Rough drafts produce the almost right word. Revisions produce the correct words, sentences, paragraphs, and scenes.

Procrastinista said:

Yes, revising requires plenty of new words, but I wonder if revising requires a different set of muscles than writing a first draft. When revising, there's a lot of focused surgical strikes. When writing a rough draft there's a flow, a tapping of the muse, a more inspired form of writing.

It's weird, when I finally move onto the next novel, I feel unshackled and am able to express my new MC in completely new ways. Upon starting each new novel, my crit group is really struck by my improvement. Sure, that improvement might've come partly by way of revising the previous novel for the past 2.5 years, but I wonder if I'd see more benefit if I worked at least a bit of each day on new drafts.

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Who knows what will work for you? You're kicking around the idea of working on new stuff whilst editing the old. Maybe that would work. You don't know until you try.

Consider the time frame, say two years. What is your goal in that time frame? To write a novel, edit the novel, complete the novel? Or is it to start a novel, start another novel, start another novel and meanwhile, edit a rough draft? I would wonder about focus and practicality, but that's just me.

In my experience, writing a first draft can be exhiliarating. Heady. But editing is where I am most satisfied with my work because I'm molding something with potential into something real. It takes a lot of concentration to do that and I find myself really involved with the story, the characters. As I edit I'm breathing life into my work. Hopefully, not sucking the life out of myself in the process because it can be intense sometimes but in the end, that effort is worth it.

To me.

Of course YMMV, Procrastinista. I do wonder if a little of bit of your name might be telling you something, though.

Procrastinista said:

I write a rough draft in about six months, but then it takes me 2.5 years to revise.

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This is interesting to me. Elsewhere I cited 3 - 4 years to make something new, but my procedure is reversed: three years to generate raw material, 3 - 6 months to make something out of it.* And I've never gone over ninety pages!

*My unpublished MS is a long essay: two years to research, one year to write. Also ninety pages.

Seems to me that the length of time it takes you to complete your book is the amount of time it should take you to do it. Similarly, the methods you use to get the book where you want it are the methods you should employ.

Just be mindful of that when it comes time to sign a contract involving deadlines.

I wonder if the writing-revision cycle gets faster the more you do it, provided that it's a learning experience.

For example, one of the bits of feedback I was given was that some of my dialogue was a bit sparse. My readers wanted more of an indication of the emotions that my characters were experiencing. They said that some scenes were more like screenplays than fiction.

It was a fair point - a failing of mine. One of many! Now when I write, I'm on the lookout for that trait. I make my dialogue shorter. I include more visual and emotional information. I tackle the issue head on when writing new words. That is one less thing to worry about (or something to worry less about) when I'm editing.

I suppose the real sin is making the same mistake over and over again. Making mistakes and learning from them is healthy.

Only you know what works for you. Some writers can turn out a very good, publishable book in a couple of weeks. Or even in a few days, when necessary. Many can go start to finish in a month. Four months is being lazy to more than a few.

I think it's always smart to question why it takes so long to write a novel, wise to look for way to shorten the time, but only you can answer what's really going on, and whether this is the best you can do. If it is the best you can do, then go with it.

For me personally, revising is much harder than writing new stuff. Like somebody already mentioned, when you write new stuff you're almost in a dream-like state, your hands are dancing across the keyboard and that adored sound of your fingers hitting happily away just seems to give wind to your powers of imagination.
I'd say revising is quite different, not completely opposite, but very different because your head is not in that frenzied state and you notice things and you ponder over it, you cut and end and rewrite and just want to hit your head with your keyboard (I'm on my third keyboard ) but it's all a necessity. It has to happen and you need to do in order to learn and grow.
I've learned the most while hitting my head against the keyboard and editing. I'm still editing, three years after I wrote The End on my novel. Yes, it's grueling but the's no way around it... And you'll always write new words while editing, even if its just a word, or two...New words always find their way.

To revise is to comprehend your mistakes; to not repeat them is to hone your craft.

Usually, I enjoy revising: when I realise that I've missed something or done something wrong, fixing it and then worrying about its impact on the rest of the work is fun.

Sometimes it's miserable. I'm reworking my novel based on some fairly unanimous criticism at a SYW thread and it's making me depressed. It's easy to take out parts because I don't like them. It's hard to take out parts I like because nobody else does.

It only took a heady 10 weeks 3/4 hours per day to write my 85,000 word first draft. I felt mostly ecstatic with how easily it flowed.
Then I read it. Blurgh. Nearly every word needed replacing. To get to draft 3 - my beta reader draft - took 4 months. Then another 4 months to get to draft 10. I knew when to stop when I was changing a word or moving a comma and then moving it back again....

Madeline Taylor said:

For me personally, revising is much harder than writing new stuff. Like somebody already mentioned, when you write new stuff you're almost in a dream-like state, your hands are dancing across the keyboard and that adored sound of your fingers hitting happily away just seems to give wind to your powers of imagination.

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That sounds amazing and I sometimes wish it would happen to me, but the story just doesn't come to me that fast. Instead, I fiddle as I write, sometimes at a reasonably steady walking pace, sometimes at a crawl, and occasionally, wonderfully, at a sprint. But creation and revision are a completely intertwined process for me. I can't separate them.

For me, I think it's (almost) two distinct creative process going on. The first draft is telling the story to yourself, so that you understand it. In my opinion, this phase has more to do with the craft of storytelling than the craft of writing. Of course, it's in a very rough state after that, but revising the draft is when I worry about "how" it's written and therefore, the art of writing. There is certainly some overlap in each phase, and there is plenty of creativity in both.

In terms of a ratio of first draft to revising, I think everyone is going to be different.

I will always and have always taken longer to revise than write. I write quite quickly, and can generally get words on a page regularly. Four months is average for a first draft.

However, I'll spend nine months, a year (two years and counting for one current WIP) on revising. Why? Because every change I make creates other little changes down the line, and I need to fix those, too. Because I keep coming up with new ideas that will make the plot work better. Because I just plain flubbed the first draft and now need to cut 50,000 words out of it.

If that ratio is what makes you get work done, then chill. You're always creating, even when you're revising. If it was six months writing and 2.5 years sitting on your behind and doing nothing, that's when you need to be worried.

... progress is your yardstick.
If you're steadily making some
then keep right on doing what you're doing.
If not, then it may be time to change tactics.

How is your current novel compared to prior one(s)?
Substantially better. If so, don't sweat it ;-)

And here I was, thinking I found the most tedious way to revise ever.

I gather all my writing and notes on the scene I am revising, review them for about an hour, making more notes as I go along. And then shove them off to the side and re-write the whole thing from memory. When I'm done I spend the rest of the time tweaking and fiddling.

I have been having that same thought. I have been working on the same novel for quite a while, but not consistently... So my problem is that I will leave for far too long and then return and realize that my writing has improved a bit since then, or I have a new thought, or I am not passionate about some of the stuff I already have on paper. So I just open up my old document and a blank new one and put them side by side and I rewrite while still looking at what I had before to see if there's anything of value that I want to keep.
I understand that that seems like a lot of unnecessary work, but it feels too cluttered to try and go in and fix the many problems; sometimes it's just better to rewrite so it feels new and uninterrupted. Otherwise, you have some sentences that were written in one mood, and then if you just start squeezing other stuff into that section, you might not achieve the same tone/feel as you did when you first wrote it. My perspective anyway!

I wrote the first draft of my current WIP in about three months. I've spent over a year revising off and on, writing two other first drafts in between revising. I understand that I'm a newb, so revising is a learning process. If I had more practice writing novels, I doubt it would take me so long to revise...