Revisions

I haven't been blogging lately because a) I went to visit my parents, who live in another state, for Memorial Day weekend; b) I've been watching Youtube videos of boy bands like One Direction and The Wanted, even though I'm more than a decade older than the members and they make the same lame hand gestures and soulful looks that the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync made years ago, and yet I can't help myself from hitting "Replay" while trying not to dance along to their music; c) I've been making a list of all the ways to get back at the jerks who cut in front of me in line, including pulling their hair and throwing water balloons at their pants so that other people will point and laugh at them and think they need to wear diapers.

I've also been revising two stories that I wrote. Here's how bad I am about procrastinating: after I finished the first draft of my first novel, I put off revising it so that I could start writing the first draft of my second novel. Now that I've finished writing that draft, I've gone back and started revising both stories.

I just finished rereading Stephen King's On Writing, and he said that an editor who rejected one of his stories gave him some very good advice: "You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%."

That advice definitely rings true as I revise my drafts. One thing I've noticed about both manuscripts is that I have a bad habit of repeating myself. For example, I noticed that the love interest of the main character in one of my stories kept running his hands through his hair, as if he was an actor in a shampoo commercial or a lead in one of those CW teen soaps. I also noticed that the main character and her love interest kept smiling at each other, as if they were actors in a toothpaste commercial or a Hallmark movie.

I also realized that the main characters of both stories are about as obsessive and neurotic as I am, because they kept worrying all the time about everything. To make matters worse, they kept describing what they felt, which broke one of the big rules of fiction writing: show, don't tell. I felt embarrassed about the fact that there was more description than action in some of the scenes.

There was also the fact that setting did not play a big role in either story. Both stories are supposed to be set in Chicago, but you wouldn't know it because there is too much dialogue and not enough details about what was going on around the characters. They might as well have been talking in an empty room.

So I printed out the drafts and have been going through them with a pen, crossing out lines and even entire paragraphs that I don't like. I've also been adding additional lines and entire scenes in the margins and on extra pages. That's why revision can be a good thing. It helps you learn from your mistakes, and it means that you can take out scenes or even characters that don't work in the story. It also means that your story could move in an entirely different direction, and that can be a good thing too.

What about you? What kinds of mistakes do you make in your first draft? What do you think of revision? How many times do you revise your drafts?