My revision really started when I went to the Write Stuff conference in 2012. James Scott Bell was the pre-conference speaker and I've already written about how I found his book, Plot and Structure, to be enormously helpful so I won't go into how his philosophies shaped my revision, even though they have. Instead I want to talk about three important tools and how they helped me: a voice journal, the synopsis and Scrivener as means to look at character relationships.
A voice journal will probably be something different to every author, perhaps every character. I've read about it as a tool to get to know your character and his voice--looking for what your character tells you. What I did was less involved. I wrote a series of snippets in Dakota's voice. Each snippet isolated a moment of the story, focusing on Dakota's thoughts, feelings or description of something. My goal was to make him brim with attitude. I wanted to push the language.
Examples:
- First lines of my very first draft: There were moments when I enjoyed the notoriety of being the Bastard Prince, but tonight was not one of those times. My duty was to be the official escort of my niece, Princess Milani, but I couldn't focus.
- After working on it as a snippet: People call me the Bastard Prince, and for good reason. Given that I was indeed a bastard in every sense of the word, I didn't understand the nerve of the woman before me, with her mocking little smile, implying that my mother was a whore.
- Description of a character in 1st draft: I didn't appreciate how close he was standing to her or how they linked their fingers where they thought no one could see. Obviously, he had chosen to be more aggressive than appropriate in trying to win her affection.
- My snippet description: He was sleek, reminding me of a crook running cons on the weak and unwary. Smiles always a little too sparkling. Confidence a little too relaxed.
Most of these snippets made their way into my latest version of the manuscript in one form or another, and I will probably revise them more as part of the whole, but writing them out of context really allowed me to focus more on what I was writing rather than what was happening. The exercise became invaluable.
After the conference, I decided many of my scenes needed to be moved around, I wanted to build tension differently than I had and the clues Dakota followed had to have the right sequence. Scrivener of course was very handy, but I found changing the scene descriptions around each time I moved my "index" cards to be laborious (this would be even more true of actual index cards). So I turned to writing multiple synopses in my notebook. It sounds like a lot of tedious work as well, but it helped me see how things connected, how they flowed from one scene to the next. I wrote notes in the margins. What if this? I need to add this. There could be a way to replicate this process in Scrivener--I have a synopsis in there too that I refer to, but my notebooks are always with me and it was something I could easily work on at lunch. The changes I made to my plot really began to take form using this method.
Finally, I wanted Dakota's relationships with the characters surrounding him to have a growth/change arc just as he did. So in Scrivener for each of the characters I was focusing on, I duplicated all their scenes and moved them to my Research Folder. The key here is that the information stored in my outline was also duplicated. I created new metadata just for this exercise and made sure it was visible. Then I made notes specific to that character: objective, conflict, view of Dakota. All without disturbing my main manuscript and outline. If necessary I made changes to the main outline.
After all of that, I read through the manuscript and made notes on how each scene needed to change. Some scenes stayed very similar, some needed to be almost completely rewritten, some were moved around, some were cut, while i wrote new ones. Then I started rewriting.
My rewrite involved a lot of planning, possibly as much as writing my original draft did. But even though it progressed in fits and starts for over a year, I believe it's the most comprehensive and systematic revision I've ever done. There is still a lot of work to be done (description!), but I am very happy with where I am and my fingers are crossed that most of my significant rewriting is complete.
