Pantsing Doesn't Mean Lots of Revising

 This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about our revision process. 

I'm running behind, as I seem to eternally be doing these days, and posting this a day late, but I feel it's important to talk about my revision process to dispel a huge myth about intuitive writers. I feel strongly enough about making this case that I'm using the term "Pantsing," which I almost never use.

(As an aside, the reason I don't like that term is that it comes from "to fly by the seat of your pants," which implies a lack of control that I think comes from the pre-plotting end of the spectrum. Writing without outlining beforehand does not mean having no control of the story. It also doesn't mean that intuitive writers don't plot. All writers plot; otherwise there wouldn't be a story. The difference lies in whether we determine the plot before writing or during it.)

A consistent message I hear from those espousing pre-plotting is that writing a book without creating an outline first leads to many blind alleys, cutting huge chunks of prose, and spending even longer on revision. While this can be true of some writers - which is fine! Figure out what your process is and own it, I always say - this is not true of me.

Intuitive writers like myself have often internalized story structure. We know how to write the novel without resorting to external guideposts like an outline. I also think that I draft faster by writing intuitively, by submersing myself in the creative flow of the subconscious. It takes me typically 55-60 working days to draft a novel of 90-100K words. Then I spend about 14 working days revising. I typically cut 1-2K words in revision and add ~10K. 

Explaining everything I do in revision would take longer than I have in this blog post, but in essence, my process is this:

1. Write the story beginning to end, skipping nothing, never jumping ahead.
2. Revise from the beginning. This involves:
   1. layering in foreshadowing and other clues for stuff I figured out along the way and about the ending.
   2. smoothing character arcs
   3. removing extraneous information, red herrings, doorways to routes I didn't follow, tweaking word choices.
3. When done, I read out loud one more time to catch any consistency errors or clunky wording.

 

And that's all she (I) wrote!

Stay Offline While Writing!

 This week at the SFF 7, we're asking what is the website you use the most while writing?

I'm going to answer this a bit contrarily. While writing - that is, while drafting - I don't use any websites at all. I do my best to stay entirely offline while drafting. Anything I feel I might need to look up, I put in square brackets and save for the revision stage. On my most recently completed book, TWISTED MAGIC, I had nearly 200 square brackets when I stopped drafting and started revising, which was at about 75% through. 

(Sometimes I draft all the way to the end, then revise; with other books I stop at some point and go back to the beginning, revise from there, then go to the end. There's no rhyme or reason to it. Each book is different. But that's another topic.)

Now, when I'm revising the website I use the most is... Plain Ol'Google. 

(What a world we live in now, where I can write down Google search as an old-fashioned method.)

Now, my Google-fu is strong. I use [word] + etymology a lot to find better words for what I'm trying to say, or that word in another language. I look up specifics on things I want to research more. I look up names. I stay away from rabbit holes, even while revising. 

For me, the internet is anti-writing, so I steer clear. Maybe that's true for you?