One of the things I was doing this week was writing a sidebar for my work-in-progress. It required some research. I was writing about a job I’d heard of, but I wanted to know more about. I investigated the topic, wrote and revised a summary of what I’d learned. Then I saved it to my manuscript.
At least, I thought I did.
A short power outage later that night proved me wrong. When I went back to work the next day, my new entry was nowhere to be found. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t always write sequentially. I might work on one section of a book and then decide to fine-tune a different part. Because of this slightly chaotic system, I hoped I’d just written my entry and accidentally saved it to an older version.
Nope.
Luckily, I’ve learned to be patient with myself over the years. So, back to the drawing—or in this case—writing, board! Time to do it again. Time to revise.
One of the things that always amazes students when I do a book talk, is how many times authors write and rewrite their books. They can’t believe the pages and pages of revision that I’ve done. It’s especially impressive when I show them binder after binder of entire books done over and over again. (Yeah, I print them out!) Their teachers love this part of my talk. They look at their students and say: “See! And you get annoyed when we ask you to rewrite an essay once!” And I can see students looking at me thinking: Thanks a lot!
But writing, good writing, is rewriting. It’s finding just the right word to allow your reader to join your characters on their adventure. It turns a pretty poem into a perfect poem. It lets the ideas in your head become a shared thought.
When we’re learning to read, we start with sentences like this:
The dog ran.
Every child who reads that sentence has their own idea of the kind of dog, the time of day, the place where the dog is running. But when we rewrite the sentence to add clarity, we bring all our readers along:
That first morning on the lake, the chocolate Labrador ran joyfully into the clear water.
Revision is all about clarity. It’s about asking your reader to join you in the world you’re describing. Whether that world is fictional or factual, your reader can be with you, right there!
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