Ramblings from Revisionland

Posted by Jen on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 @ 9:04 pm

Popping in to say hi from Revisionland. My Cave has somehow magically expanded into a entire land full of pronouns and sentence restructuring. It’s a fun land, but it has the unfortunate side effect of Revision Brain. Now, I’ve heard other writers talk about Revision Brain before (and yes, it does need the caps), and I thought I’d experienced it before myself, but no! Oh no. I was wrong. This is Revision Brain, my dear friends, and it isn’t pretty.

When Revision Brain happens, you are so entirely inside of your own head thinking about your world and characters in order to get every little thing perfect, and so entirely inside of it every single minute of the day, that you forget to do things like, I don’t know, eat. And when you do eat, your mind isn’t completely there so you might accidentally end up eating a really stale piece of pizza instead of something a little more substantial. It really reminds of when I took programming classes in college, and I’d stay up all night fiddling with code to make it absolutely perfect. And this is kinda like programming. I’m stringing code of words together, moving them around, changing them up, adding things so I can make the best program I possibly can. We don’t want any glitches in this system.

So, what exactly am I doing in Revisionland? Well, my agent had terrific ideas on how to make this thing stronger. One of these was to strengthen the voice. See, I wrote it in third POV, and I have to admit, I lost the voice in some places. So, I came up with the insane brilliant idea to change the whole thing to first person and use that as a starting point to up the voice. Now, I know this automatically sounds like a lot of work, and don’t get me wrong, it’s taking time. But it isn’t that bad. And I have to say, the improvement I’m seeing is totally worth it. The book is better like this. To me, that makes the work more than worth it. When I read the old version and compare it with the new, I know I’m doing the right thing. But maybe that’s the Revision Brain talking.

Comments

By Dan on January 14th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

I seem to recall reading an interview with Michael Crichton where he said that when he was in “writing mode”, he would eat the same thing every day…that way he wouldn’t have to use valuable brain-juice figuring out what to eat.

That probably doesn’t help much, but it is a tidbit. And I do love tidbits.