I'm crazily busy at the moment with the book and with client work, and am really looking forward to kicking back with some friends and a bottle of wine tonight. I have developed a new technique for squeezing out a few more drops of work before I stop for a break. You probably all do this already, but I'll tell you anyway - I pick a page of the book at random (just edited page 113, for example) and edit it ferociously. Just that page. And then I have a cup of coffee. It is somehow less of a slog doing something entirely random and small, and it's a nice surprise when I come across an already-edited page in the normal course of things.
I will leave you with a couple of great quotes on revision that the lovely Annie King shared with me.
“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it….The first draft is the most uncertain—where you need the guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.” -
Bernard Malamud
"My method is one of continuous revision; while writing a long novel, every day I loop back to the earlier sections, to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice; when I write the final two to three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening of the novel, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others." - Joyce Carol Oates
I hope you're all having a great week!
P.S. Just realised I used the phrase 'in the normal course of things' twice in this post. In the normal course of things, I don't use that phrase at all.
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