Beside the normal stuff, what do you guys try to improve when you revise? When I'm almost done I try to remove unneeded words, mostly "just", "that", and "because".
I do tend to see more of my repetitions when I let it sit and return to it later. Then I notice lots of "almost" and "seemed to" and "started to." But mostly I try to make sentences more literary because my first tendency when I write is to be "clear," which means that I explain and get too technical, so then I try to change technical-sounding words to more poetic synonyms.
Now with other issuses, it can go both ways: some sentences need to be trimmed, others need to be unpacked, to use a popular term. So it depends.
Shitty writing.
What Renfield said.
If I edited out all my shitty writing, I'd have nothing left! My first editing pass I read out loud to get rid of unnatrual sounding dialogue. I cannot fucking stand bad dialogue, possibly because I suffer through so much of it daily. So bad dialogue, and other signs of just really amateurish blundering - too many passive verbs, and of course.... adverbs. Oh, that's right, I don't use adverbs because I write awesomely.
I revise to fix up a first draft and try to make a few of the connections that I didn't see while writing it become more powerful. I try to mix in my Setting, Character, and Action so that nothing reads as a big info-dump or gets carried away with one idea at a time (I love layered stories where those three ingrediants mix).
Then I workshop it. I get sick of my writing very soon after finishing a story and can't see the bigger picture anymore (I only see sentences that don't look like they connect).
I guess I just fix the problems I see in a revision. Until I workshop it. Then it becomes a whole other beast of fixing missing parts, making more sense of the situation, adding depth, putting in more of everything good (and trimming out the stuff I thought was good, but that keeps getting brought up as jarring, obvious, or whatever).
Firstly, what Renfield said and SparrowStark seconded.
Repetitive use of words is a biggie with me.
Sentence flow.
And most importantly, am I keeping in line with the character/narrators voice?
After that I take it to a workshop of sorts and let someone outside my head read it and see if it makes sense.
I just took a workshop on doing better revisions! Short of being a better writer in general, basically it is as follows;
#1 Finish. First drafts are always shitty.
#2 Revise like a motherfucker. The best writers are really the ones who finish, and have the tenacity and stomach to repeatedly murder their babies. Talent is great, tenacity wins the race.
#3 Your stories are not your children. You can murder them.
The long and short of less painful revising is to NOT start at the beginning, spending a bunch of time editing out words in sentences that you may wind up cutting in the end; point bein, you may become unnecessarily attached to them after investing time and effort into the spelling and grammar, when realistically they may not serve the piece as a whole. Logical, n'est pas?
Work from the ending, making sure there is a logical progression to the beginning. Think of it in terms of a piece of art; if you have a surreal artist who has an arm coming out of the chest portion of a torso but it really works better in the groin, would the artist invest a bunch of time filling in the details of the hand on the arm until she has got it in the correct place on the body? KnowwhatImean? Structure before breaking out the magnifying glass, maybe.
Lastly, Vanessa Veselka taught me to always and forever read every work aloud before considering it finished. That has been the most helpful, and my cat likes it when I read to her.
Nice post . Bryan I am with you in that I can't read my stories with a fresh mind after a while. I like doing the rough draft, I find cool things in the first draft. Then I make the story in the second draft and that's fun. Then I edit for overused words, stupid things, eats. Then someone tells me to overhaul it and I sigh. And do it. Writing is fun but not easy.
