Today is not just WIP Wednesday, but also between birthdays day. Whose birthdays you ask? My husband Andy's b-day was yesterday on St. Patrick's day and my own b-day is tomorrow (Which is on the lesser known Feast of St. Joseph day. Poor St. Joseph, there is just no competing with green beer.).And now... on to the Work in Progress Wednesday fun!
If anyone else out there in the blogosphere wants to join in on the fun, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.
For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.
So, after finishing the first draft of my WIP aka Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea aka BTDATDBS. Um, yeah... I'll probably just continue to refer to at it as my WIP. Anyway, after finishing the first draft last week I was going to wait a week before starting on rewrites. But then Saturday night my husband was at a friend's bachelor party and my WIP started calling to me. I could not resist, and I started rewriting chapter one.
Now Annie in comments a few weeks ago mentioned that this was a fairly short time to let a work sit before jumping back in for rewrites, and I agree. When the words are fresh on the page, it is hard to have the distance to really see what is and is not working. The thing is that I wrote chapter one all the way back in July of 2008, so those words are way past their sell-by date.
Also, helping with the distance factor is my ability to quickly forget. (Sure, some people would call it a memory problem, but that's so negative.) As I've been writing I've submitted the first ten chapters or so to my online crit group, and as I've looked at some of their comments and then back at what I wrote there have been times when I've been like, "Wow, I don't even remember writing that."
The final reason though that I feel comfortable jumping into revisions so soon is that these are only Level 1 revisions.
Now you may be asking - What are Level 1 revisions? And do I need some sort of special clearance to work on them?
Level 1 revisions are... well they're kind of like this thingy:
This thingy is actually called a street roller (I found this out after much Googling trying to find an image of something that I did not know the actual name of. It was challenging to say the least.) Now I am not in construction, so I could be totally wrong about this, but I think this machine kind of smooths the blacktop and makes it all even. And that's basically what I want to do with my Level 1 revisions, because right now crap is just all over the place. Despite the fact that I did kind of outline and plot the darn thing out, there were still elements and characters and just stuff that changed once I got into things.
Lady Glamis a few weeks ago at The Innocent Flower blog discussed this process as "working in layers", which is also a good (and less convoluted) way to think about it. I am specifically referring to her point #4 towards the end of the post where she talks about:
My first layers are polishing up the plot holes and character inconsistencies. Things that bugged me the whole way through the first draft that I kept telling myself I'd go back and fix later.
Ah. Isn't it nice when someone else's words say so well what you want to say, but can't think how to?
Anyway, I have a whole list of things that I've figured out after a scene was written, but afraid of losing my forward momentum I instead mentally filed them away (Or being aware of my super-forgetting powers I usually often recorded them on the same Word document where I keep plot points and character arcs.) to be taken care of during this Level 1 revision stage.
Really my end goal is to make my WIP pretty enough that I can ask some people to beta read it, without wasting their time with things that I already know need to be fixed. After I get my WIP back from betas, I'll take some time to absorb their comments (comments, especially the negative ones, are kind of like soup. They're always better the second day.) and then go in for Level 2 revisions.
So, that's been my week in writing. What about you? Anyone else working on rewrites, and if so what Level are you at? And if not in rewrites, where is your WIP?
