Great article from Joe Hill, author of Horns, about his revision process. If you write, read this!

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Pour Me Another Draft

by Joe Hill

Over on Twitter, I mentioned I was working on the third draft of the new novel, and was met with a bunch of questions about revision. Someone wanted to know how many drafts I do, someone else wanted to know if I type things in from scratch or if I just edit on the screen, another person wanted to know what kind of changes I make in each draft, and so on.

I love Twitter, but sometimes you need more than 140-characters. Here’s what I can tell you about the approach I take to rewrite.

Regardless of what form I’m working in – short story, novel, comic script, screenplay, poem – I tend to do five drafts.

Sometimes I do more: one particularly difficult script for LOCKE & KEY required eight drafts and a chart. Sometimes I do less: again, in the case of LOCKE & KEY, I know the characters so well at this point, I occasionally get things right after only two drafts. But usually I need five passes before I’m satisfied.

The most time consuming drafts are the first and the third. It’ll surprise no one to hear first drafts are a lot of work (and also a lot of fun). That’s the most creative part of the process, where I line sentences up to make a story.

But the third draft is just as much work, involves as much creative effort, and is often just as fun. Sometimes more fun. With my third draft, everything is rewritten from scratch. No cutting-and-pasting, no editing on-screen. Every single chapter, paragraph, and sentence must prove its worth or die. If a scene isn’t working, it gets deleted. If it carries important information, information the reader needs, a new scene is invented to provide it.

The third draft often contains moments of radical reinvention. The current novel is, in part, about Charles Talent Manx, someone who is both more and less than a man: a fussy dimwit who has lived over a hundred years as a kind of road vampire (although he doesn’t suck blood… forget all that, kids). Part II of the book was an enclosed 120-page novella about Manx’s ramblings. I worked at it for two months; there were quite a few setbacks, but eventually I was able to get Manx’s voice right and tell some interesting things about his life.

And then in the third draft, I cut the whole thing. And before you ask, no, I have no plans to ever see it published. I had to write that part to figure out who Manx was. But in the end, it wasn’t dynamic enough to make the cut. So it had to go.

The third draft isn’t just a matter of chopping heads. I do a lot of new writing. I’ve rewritten 300+ pages of this book so far and probably 70 pages of that is new.

Of course a lot of revision is a simple matter of tightening and polishing. For example, here’s a bit from the 2nd draft of the new novel:

She smiled before she sat down – that Vic smile, where only one corner of her mouth turned up, an expression which somehow seemed to suggest regret more than unhappiness. What she regretted, Lou wasn’t sure. She put herself on the edge of the seat, leaned forward, and steepled her hands together, made a cradle for her chin with her thumbs. She watched her son. They both watched him. He was more interesting than any pyrotechnics the city of Boston meant to use in their doomed annual assault on the sky.

“I already know why you want to talk,” she said.

“Maybe I just thought you shouldn’t be lonely for the Fourth of July,” he said. “Couldn’t it be that?”

“Did he say something about the woman who came to see me yesterday?”

He had never figured out how to make small talk with her. He wasn’t sure she knew how to do it.

“He asked about Charlie Manx.”

That’s all a lot of writing. I hate writing. I just want story. Story and a little music. Writing slows the reader down to admire the handiwork, but I don’t want the reader slowing down for anything, if I can help it. Here’s how it reads in third draft:

She smiled before she sat – that Vic smile, where only one corner of her mouth turned up, an expression which somehow seemed to suggest regret as much as happiness.

“I already know why you want to talk,” she said.

“Maybe I just wanted us to have Fourth of July together as a family,” Lou said. “Couldn’t it be that?”

“Did he say something about the woman who turned up in the yard yesterday?”

“He asked me about Charlie Manx.”

The most obvious thing you see here is that there’s a lot less. We don’t need a description of how Vic is sitting in her chair, for Chrissake. The reader will imagine it. That stuff about Boston and pyrotechnics is a drag. And Lou does, in fact, know many of Vic’s reasons for carrying around a sense of regret, so why say he doesn’t?

Also, I like that Lou says he wants them to be together as a family; that seems subtly more “Lou” than saying he doesn’t want her to be lonely. That’s the kind of change I might not have made if I was just cutting and pasting things. When I’m rewriting from scratch, I don’t want to just copy stuff over, I want to invent.

The second draft and the fourth draft are less exciting. I read over my manuscript, and I tweak things for clarity, and then I type in changes. In my fifth draft, I incorporate my editor’s suggestions and thoughts. A lot of times there’s fun to be had here, too, because there’s room to invent some more stuff. My editor (the most excellent Jen Brehl) might want to know more about a certain character, for example. And so I’ll make something up. But mostly the fifth draft is more a matter of dusting the counters and straightening the chairs.

Other notes: I write entirely with Microsoft Word, although in each draft, I print up a new copy, and make changes on paper, before entering anything on the screen. Editing straight from the screen is lazy. I don’t show first drafts, not to anyone. I don’t even like to talk about first drafts. The third draft is the time to start getting feedback (I’ve been reading parts of the new novel at various appearances now that I’m comfortable with it).

Finally, I try to work slow. I plod, double-check, and triple-check and then check a couple more times. If I go slow enough, I can hopefully craft something that the reader will fly through in a straight rush. That’s the goal, anyway.

That’s it. That’s what I’ve got.

Oh, and this blog entry? Just two drafts. If I can’t be lazy on my blog, shiiiiit, what’s the point of having one???!?

July 28th, 2011