It was a busy week of client work here at the Garret, and that damn blurb is still hanging over my head. Despite the crowded week, could I have found an hour or two to tackle the blurb? Yes, I could have, but instead I spent it wandering around in historical newspaper archives reading interesting tidbits, such as this January 1830 letter to the editor of London’s Morning Chronicle: 

On the 16th October last, a respectable young gentleman, clerk to a mercantile house, went, as was his custom, to put his letters into the General Post-office; in passing through the hall, a constable rudely desired him to “move on;” he answered, “I am moving on.” The constable immediately pushed him with such violence as to knock a boy down, and then, without suffering him to put his letters in, he pushed him down the steps into St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Finding that he was returning to the hall, he attacked him again with increased violence, and finally dragged him to the door nearest to Newgate-street, where, with the assistance of another man in the livery of the Post-office, he put him into a hole (which they call the cage) formed in the stone work at the entrance; there he locked him up for an hour and a half, and ultimately dragged him through the streets to the Poultry Compter, where, the charge not being satisfactory, he was dismissed. The constable has since been confined in a mad-house; and as I was a witness to the transaction, I can say that I believe he was not in his sober senses at the time.

Fascinating, right? And it raises so many more delicious questions: Were constables all over London just popping unlucky citizens into improvised holding cells? Were drunks routinely taken to mad-houses? What the hell is the Poultry Compter? I could have easily lost an entire day following these research rabbit holes, but I contented myself with pulling the letter into my notes in case I want to use it in my book. 

Back, however, to my real point, which is this: I spent my free hour doing early stage research for my novel because it is easy and fun. I knew the blurb was higher-priority, but my brain felt taxed and unready for a harder task. Sometimes you’re just having a busy week and need to give yourself a break. However, if you find yourself repeatedly delaying or avoiding the hard task, you need to step back and ask yourself why.

Do you need to create more white space in your weeks so you have not just the time but the intellectual energy to confront the hard task? Are you putting it off because the task feels too big or too scary? Are you sure you know what the first step is?

Last week I wrote about writers substituting editing for the harder work of revising. This week I want to write a little bit more about the fear factor, about why we are reluctant to enter that dark wood of revision.

One key fear: authors worry that altering one small piece of their book will cause the entire shaky pile of words to come tumbling down.

I can assure you it won’t! But it’s true that embarking on revision can feel like taking a step backward. When you are writing your first draft, you can see the words accumulating along the way, which gives you a sense of progress, and you get a nice big check mark when you get to The End. It’s hard then to move into the next phase, which feels scary and amorphous and doesn’t have a lot of stopping points along the way. How do you even know when the revision stage is complete?

One goal of this blog is to map out the revision process, step by step. I’ll lead you through assessing the big-picture elements of your novel—genre, plot, characters, narration, setting—and show you the tools I use as an editor to evaluate manuscripts. After these big-picture elements, we’ll talk about how to make a master plan for elements that need to be fixed and how to tackle them scene-by-scene, while also making sure that your scenes have all of the elements they need (good openings and closings, a healthy balance of dialogue, subtext, and dramatic summary). Finally, we’ll circle back around to editing, and I’ll show you what to look for when you do a final polish of your sentences.

The end goal is to pull all of this content together into a course that I hope will make the revision process less scary and mysterious for authors.

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