Monday, April 28, 2008

Revising the revision.

I've been yanking words for one section and shoving them into another and I think I've now dealt with the huge indigestible glob of backstory that was choking me. In the process I've lost about 500 words, but I have added lots of new ones. Not enough to make up for all the deleted ones, but never mind. I need to print the whole thing out and sit quietly with it to read it through from start to finish now. Lord knows what I've done to my timelines with all this. If I can get that done over the weekend I'll be lucky, but it's what I'm aiming for. My beta readers are lined up and ready to start as soon as I finish messing with the ms. I better get this done before they all grow old!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you had to deal with excess exposition and backstory a lot in revision?

I'm a long way from addressing the overall cohesiveness of my story--at this point I barely have one--but I find that in my draft writing I slip into huge amounts of exposition (sometimes backstory...my characters aren't fleshed out enough to have much backstory yet).

There's a lot to be said for just getting words on paper no matter how messy, but I think I'm looking at HUGE amounts of revision later. Which is fine, as I'm a bit of an editing nut anyway, but I wonder about just how hard it's going to be to disentangle and focus the story.

So I'm curious about what your process has been getting to this point.