Gearing Up to Tackle Revisions

I'm plugging away on my draft (whenever I can!), and now I'm starting to think about the major revisions looming in my future. I have "to fix" and "to add" documents that I've been keeping up as I draft, but the sheer number of items on each is daunting.

What I need is a revision plan. Luckily for me, there are lots of great resources to help me get organized. One of the absolute best I've ever seen is Susan Dennard's Tackling Revisions post on the Pub(lishing) Crawl blog. She suggests isolating the big-picture issues first, then breaking each one into a series of manageable chunks. One of my favorite pieces of advice from this post is to do an outline of your story after you finish the first draft, and before you revise. This will show you pretty quickly which scenes add to the story and which need to be cut.

(Side note: that Susan Dennard's pretty smart. She's also the author of the How to Write a 1-Page Synopsis worksheet, the only one I've found that actually makes short synopsis writing bearable.)

Marissa Meyer (author of the Lunar Chronicles series) explains her revision process here. She's also a fan of writing out all of your scenes to see which ones are working and which ones aren't. She adds the advice to color-code all of the main plots and subplots. I love this advice! It seems like an excellent way to see at a glance which plots need more airtime and which are taking up too much space.

And finally, former agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford has some encouraging words for the inevitable revision fatigue--you know, that moment when you're so sick of the book that you never want to see it again. Having gotten to this point with all four manuscripts I've finished, I'm keeping that one in my back pocket. The comments are definitely worth a read, too.

How do you tackle revisions?

Taking Inspiration from Great First Lines

Did you know that Stephen King spends months, even years writing the first few lines of his novels? (Read the article in The Atlantic here.)

One of the things King says in the interview is this: "But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this."

Just about every literary agent and editor I've ever heard speak agrees that first lines are vitally important in the modern literary world. This article from The Telegraph theorizes that this is largely due to the distractions of technology and the ability to "drop" a book and download another instantly if the first one doesn't grab you immediately.

So how do you make sure the first lines of your manuscript hook your readers? One of the best ways is to study examples of great ones from literature. Lines like "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (1984) and "Marley was dead: to begin with." (A Christmas Carol) grab the reader instantly—you want to read on to find out why that would be, or why that would have been said like that. Check out an extensive list of great first lines here on Pub(lishing) Crawl.

If you need help getting your own first lines into shape, here are some online resources that may help:

• That All-Important First Line (from The Kill Zone)
• 6 Ways to Hook Your Reader from the Very First Line (from Write it Sideways)
• 7 Keys to Write the Perfect First Line of a Novel (from thewritepractice.com)
• Famous First Lines Reveal How to Start a Novel (from Writer's Digest)

Writer's Resource: Pub(lishing) Crawl

One of the best times of my day is when I pull up my blog reader (usually on my phone these days, since the baby makes laptop time scarce) and read the new posts. I follow a few dozen writing blogs, some written by agents, some by editors, and some by aspiring or published authors.

I find myself bookmarking posts from one of them far more frequently than any of the others, so I thought it would be a good idea to highlight it here as a writer's resource.

Pub(lishing) Crawl is, in their own words, "...a group of authors and industry professionals (formerly known as Let the Words Flow) who blog about all things writing, publishing, and books!"

According to their Who We Are page, there are currently 16 contributors, including editors, a bookseller, a sales rep, and authors. They post on a huge variety of topics, including writing and editing techniques, new book releases, and tips on how to survive life as a published author. They also host giveaways and often feature guest bloggers, so there's always a good reason to check back frequently.

What are your favorite writing-related blogs?