Five Challenges I’ve Had While Revising This Novel (Patreon)

I finished the first draft of my current novel project earlier this year. It was a whopping 127,000 words in the first draft, my longest draft yet. I was glad to be done but daunted by the amount of revision ahead of me.

Well, I was right to be daunted. And I’ve stayed daunted. Revising has been hard for me my whole career, but this has been the hardest project yet to revise. So I’m going to try to unpack a few of these challenges in the hope that A) It might help me make better progress moving forward and B) maybe this process will help some of you reading with your own revision challenges.

1) There’s Too Many Books in This Book

When I was looking for a new agent in late 2018, I mentioned to one potential agent that ANNIHILATION ARIA “could end up being one of several different books”. What I meant there is that with an editorial revision still ahead, I could (working with the editor) push the novel in one of a few different directions. I could play up the found family element (which is what I ended up doing), or I could have gone more sociological/political, focusing more on the way the Vsenk control information and maintain their empire.

Up until a certain point, any given manuscript is still flexible, it can be massaged and manipulated into different final forms.

This current project, by dint of its scope and breadth, is almost overwhelming with all of the different novels it could become. And I’m still wrestling with those possibilities and trying to decide my path forward so that I can start to collapse that waveform and settle the book toward a specific execution. Do I try to focus down on the main characters and their very specific journey? Do I try to convey all of the social context of the story in a way that helps a reader come away encouraged and inspired to get involved in social change themselves? Can I do both without sacrificing either?

I’m trying to address this challenge by thinking about who my ideal reader is, what I want the book to make them feel/help them see. I’m thinking about what I want the book to do and mean when it gets out into the world.

2) I’m Still Discovering the Characters

Another challenge is that I’m still not fully satisfied with my grasp of the characters. Some I have much more on-lock than others, and that gap between the characters I understand more and those that still elude me a bit is very frustrating – I haven’t found my way deeper into those characters the way I found my way into a deeper understanding of Lahra in Annihilation Aria (which was to play up the song magic of her people and her feelings about Genae society and history).

I’m trying to address this challenge by revisiting the chapters of those more elusive characters and to think deeply about their social context and how to connect more fully with them. I’m still very much trying to make this one work and I’m not there yet.

3) I’m Way Out of My Comfort Zone

Since I started publishing novels, I’ve tried to set myself a new challenge with each book. Push my craft here, be more deliberate about writing for a market there.

This novel is a stretch in several different ways all at once. I’m trying to write with a greater sociological breadth and writing a stand-alone with no intention to expand it into a series and more consciously infusing the work with my political perspectives AND I’m pushing myself to do more with extensive use of diegetic epigraphs (start-of-chapter bits from in-world sources like news reports, journalism, social media, etc).

This makes it harder to hold the whole novel in my head at once, and harder to focus on the stretch/new challenges.

The way I’m trying to address this is to break big revision tasks into smaller, more achievable tasks, and by building an even bigger bullet-point list for revision (which has been my revision approach for several projects over the past few years).

Which leads me to the next point:

4) The Big Things Are So Big They’re Hard to Break Down

Just the process of breaking big revision tasks down into more manageable ones has been hard. There are so many moving parts (see above) that I need to break things down into even smaller chunks.

And when I break things down into those smaller chunks, it’s very hard to feel like I’m making substantial progress. It’s a large novel, there’s a lot to do, and revision has always been harder for me in terms of maintaining momentum. Why? It’s about metrics and judging my progress. With a first draft, I can look at my word count spreadsheet and see my progress very clearly. I wrote five days this week, and I got 800 to 1500 words written each day. That kind of progress is easy to understand.

Staring at a chapter for thirty minutes and then writing a hundred words to address a bullet point of revision, but not the whole point, is harder to for me to measure in a way that feels real.  This makes me think that I should break that bigger bullet point into a several smaller points, but that contributes to a snowballing effect of an ever-growing to-do list.

5) Also, There’s a Pandemic On?

I saved this for last because it intersects with everything.

This is not a normal year. Every book is its own journey, but this year has been especially hard on mental health for just about everyone, and I’m no exception. Not being able to go and work at coffee shops, not being able to see friends in person in the same way, not having the release valve of going to eat lunch at a favorite neighborhood joint, not getting to see colleagues at conventions and chat casually in hallways and over meals. An ambient buzz of fear and mourning for lives needlessly lost because of executive callousness and toxic selfishness stoked by propaganda.

The list goes on.

This novel was going to be hard to revise even without a global pandemic. And the fact that this book is more thoroughly and consciously political makes this even harder. There was a run of about 6-8 weeks before the presidential election where I just couldn’t muster the energy to work on this book.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic, with promising vaccines and an incoming US president that will actually attempt national public health leadership.

I’m not racing against a deadline with this book – I’ll finish it when I can, I’ll do the best I’m able to, and if it takes a while longer, that’s not the end of the world.

I feel a bit better having written this, and I hope if you’re struggling with a project this year, maybe you feel a bit better having read it.