I am deep into my revisions of Black Excellence, and gosh, this is painful. I went through all my scenes today and discovered a 5,000-word shortfall of my contracted 90K words. So, that is a whole new chapter, which I have drafted and will complete tomorrow.
Revisions are tough for most writers, so I always look to how my literary heroes have approached them.
Haruki Murakami said in ‘Novelist As a Vocation’ that he rewrites countless times, and so did Toni Morrison.
Kiese Laymon has spoken a lot about revision, and I particularly love this: ‘Love necessitates revisitation. How do you love some shit that you don’t go back to?’
And so I try to dive into the discomfort of my bad drafts, but not alone.
Critique groups help galvanize me to revise. The encouragement from the group of the edits I have done plus their thoughts on what to tackle next are invaluable.
I also try books like Kristopher Jansma’s Revisionaries, which is about the unfinished or bad drafts of literary greats, and books on how to revise, like Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done and Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses.
Finally, when I can’t take it anymore, I share a metaphorical bottle of wine with Charles Bukowski, who hated revision so much that he didn’t bother and so went unpublished for decades.
I might also reread Scratch by Manjula Martin to remind myself how lucky I am to have a book deal. It always hastens me back to work.
There’s no way around it, except there are writers who write very slowly, like a paragraph a day, and revise in their heads as they write and plan ahead, as well as all other sorts of juju, so it comes out perfect. I’m not one of those.
So here we are: overdue and under word count. We'll be back at it tomorrow.
It doesn’t feel like it, but this is the best part!