Time it takes you to revise a novel?

Today I finished my 2nd novel, at about 65,000 words. By finishing, I mean the grunt work of writing the chapters.

Now I'm set to revise it top to bottom, as many times as I think necessary until the book is ready for me to send to my agent.

I'm planning on this taking about 6 weeks, working maybe 4-5 hours per day, on average. I'm sort of on deadline but not rushing it. My agent wants to have this book in hand sometime in January and that seems to be a target I can meet.

How long does it take you to edit and revise your novel after it's "first-draft finished"?

It depends on the novel, but never more than a month.

Which really means two months because I've found it is a Very Good Thing to let the first draft sit a month before I look at it, or even think about it, again.

Yup, it's very helpful to let it sit for at least a month before working on it. The way I look at it, treat your second draft as if you were writing it from scratch again... see it not as the person who wrote it, but as an editor.

Revision, length

Katdad,
I think it's important to know how long the novels are these folks are talking about. Sheer physics enters the question.

The novel I'm working for publication is 120k. I spent several months revising it, but that included time out to bury a relative, and to let it perk a bit. I also played around with style, taking several passes that way. By passes I mean I tweaked the doc on computer; I didn't print, redline, revise, edit. I don't write every novel this way, but in this case it was the way to go due to changes in my life and goals.

It needs another revise as of late, so I'm letting it sit a week or two. (This makes me mad, but there's nothing for it. I can't force the thing.) This revise is full redline, blue line, outline, whatever.

I expect this revision, which includes plot changes, to take one to two months. I'm hoping one month of 50-hour weeks, but there's no rushing genius, is there? I plan to work Christmas.

Also, re plot change: one of the chars I killed off in draft was a brother. A month later, my real brother died. I plan to change that story line, for reasons I'll spare you. In all I'm thrilled to have kept working my book. Some advised me to let it alone and grieve but work has saved me, and the book is richer for it.

Anyway, I am nothing if not a scheduler and planner. I set milestones, goals, and meet them. This ability has served me as a novelist, with the caveat I've found I cannot write a 350-page novel and polish it strictly within the time frames I set. Still, the guides are invaluable in keeping me aware of tangible results, and understanding how long it takes me to write and polish a 350-page novel. Currently that's about 18 months, but in each of those cases there was a family tragedy that slowed the work...my goal is to finish one novel door-to-door per year, in addition to shorter fiction and non-fiction writing.

I wrote a 50k word novel in 20 days in November, for National Novel Writing Month. I like this one, and I think I could whip it into something publishable in a month. I can't explain it, but I don't have the same emotional investment in that novel, and that makes it easier to revise. Whereas the long one I've been working over a year is more arduous to get to the quality I know it must be.

Thanks for an interesting question.

Re: Revision, length

I think it depends on how much reworking you have to do. I have a 130K novel that was originally straight fiction, and I finished, revised...and then suddenly had a brilliant idea (or completely stupid, depending on my mood and my proximity to ambient light) of how I could make it urban fantasy to fit in with the other novel in the works. This meant not just revising but massive rewriting. So I guess I've written a 130K story and then, over the past year, essentially rewritten that. Then again, this has been in three bursts: one to write (about two months), one to revise the first time (about a month), and after four or five months of letting it sit, I revise and polish again. I was writing other stuff in the meantime, and needed a bit of distance to be able to apply what I've learned in the year since I first wrote the story.

However, I also revised roughly ten chapters yesterday, including six scenes from scratch. I'll be doing the redpen on those new scenes tomorrow - about 24 hours is a good break, for me, between writing and revising a scene. So while I've taken long breaks, when I do start revising, I do it as fast as I write - that is to say, as though I were obsessed. Bad habit, I suppose.

So I guess perhaps going from draft to final has to do with whether the story suddenly jumps sideways under your fingers and requires rewriting in part or whole, how long the story is, whether you've got solid crits to ease the revision process, and whether you can type/edit really fast.

;P

Re: Revision, length

how long the story is, whether you've got solid crits to ease the revision process, and whether you can type/edit really fast.

Click to expand...

I've found it can depends on one's educational background (I'm speaking of first time novelists) and other writing experience, and how many novels one has written--maybe.

To over simplify I'll admit my first novel took longer to revise, becuase I was learning craft at the time. Rather than wait until I had some ed. and other practice under my belt, I dove into writing the thing. It wasn't a terrible book, really; but I wallowed in it a couple of years.

I'm finding it takes less time with each book, but again, a caveat: a book that is dearer to me, i.e. more honest, more theme, can take longer to perk between revises. It took me a while to get to where I could keep an entire long novel in my head at once. This ability has sped the process incrementally.

Re: Revision, length

I took 18 months to write the first draft of my first novel. Then it took me less than 2 months to finish the second draft. After that, I did keep on tinkering with it, especially after I started to submit it. The biggest revision after that was to cut 7 chapters off the top to make the story tighter. I guess I tend to be a slow writer and perfectionist (first draft) but a fast editor.

Re: Revision, length

Wait a sec--I thought you said in another post you spent five years? Or maybe I'm thinking of someone else. Just curious and nosey Whoever it was that said that I mentioned five years for a first novel is pretty common.

I'm a fast writer and a slow revisor. Darn. And no, writing slowly in the first place doesn't change that. I'm the "writing is revising" brand.

Re: Revision, length

No, it took me five years from "concept" to completing it (including the 2nd, 3rd... drafts). I started *writing* the ms. in November 2001.

Re: Revision, length

Oh lord by that measure I've spent decades on some novels.

eee-ha.

Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Revision, length

One novel that I wrote years and years ago (and that resides in a drawer somewhere (yuck!... the novel, not the drawer)) is over 400,000 words, and I after had written it I kept revising it endlessly. Finally I gave up in it, mainly because it's... junk.
I've done other stories and novels, but I have to tell myself not to revise too much or I'll be revising forever.
Does anyone have the tencdecy to do too much revising, if there is such a thing, or do you know when it's 'jsut right', so to speak.

Re: Revision, length

I have an advantage in some ways, since my first creative writing teachers emphasized that revision is the backbone of the process. Write fast, get it done, and then spend 80% of the total time...in revision. I adore revising. It's fun, aggravating, sometimes frustrating, but mostly fun. So unlike some writer-friends, I s'pose it was beaten into me at an early age that for every hour I spend writing, I'll spend two more revising what I just wrote - maybe not revise all at once, or right away, but it will happen.

But I also have a background in major, massive technical documentation. Once you get the knack of organizing disparate information of a highly technical level, and figuring out how to present it, order it, explain it, conclude it - some of mine have been over 400 pages - then the idea of mentally juggling a main plot and five or six sub-plots along with up to 16 characters...well, not really as intimidating, I suppose. I know writers who flip when they realize their outline is complex enough that they've got a 100K+ novel on their hands. Some of them quit at that point, as if too overwhelmed by that much writing. Hell, I know I was, the first time I sat down to write a novel (as opposed to short stories or novellas, for a class) ...and six chapters in, I stopped, because it felt like I would never ever finish it. The number was just incomprehensible to me, and I was too boggled, maybe too easily.

Now, after five or six years of having clients tell me, "and we want a book like THIS," and then plopping a 4-inch thick three-ring binder under my nose...I scoff at anything less than 130K as a preliminary rough draft. I'm going to knock a good 10% off when I'm revising, might as well have as much raw material to work with as possible.

On the other hand, I envy short story writers. I suck at short stories, but doesn't stop me from thinking: wow. You could start, revise, and finish in the same week...and I'm stuck with 'in the same month' if I bust my tailpipes. Wah.

Re: Revision, length

The length of the novel really doesn't make much difference to me until I cross the 180,000 word mark, then you can add another week or two, depending on how much work there is to do.

How clean the first draft is makes much more difference than length. How much revision a novel needs is obviously a huge factor. So, I think, is editorial experience. Editorial experience, in fact, also makes a really big difference, both in writing the first draft, and in how long it takes to revise and do the second draft.

I can mark the changes I need in a first draft about as fast as I can read it, and doing this almost never takes more than four or five days. Sometimes it's faster because I already know most of the changes I want to make before I type "The End" on the first draft.

I tend to see what needs changed as I write the first draft. I don't make changes then, but I do write from that point on just as if I had made the changes.

This means I seldom have to revise more than a dozen scenes all told, and heavily edit half a dozen others. For me, revising is usually more a matter of cutting and tightening and getting rid of clunky sentences and rough dialogue than anyting else.

Most of these scene changes are to bring focus to theme and motivation. It just doesn't take all that long. Revising is a heck of a lot faster than first draft writing because I usually already know what needs to be done and how to do it before I start.

Revising shouldn't have to mean starting at page one and writing a whole new novel for the second draft.

But I've extinsively revised the novels of other writers in no more than a month.

Thanks for the feedback

As with most things we have diverse opinions here. Which is good.

This isn't my first novel and a portion of it was written some time ago -- I undertook a major rewrite and expansion recently. So I'm not starting from a totally 'virgin' novel here.

But I've found that since I wrote the first portion, I've become a better writer, and so I'm both faster, and require less revision.

Since I posted this initial query I've been through a few chapters, tweaking here and there. I'll do this throughout, then re-read again.

Next I'll print out the book and read it through to myself, aloud. I've found this really helps catch errors, clumsy construction, and other flaws that you might skim over when reading silently.

And like most people, I find errors in hard copy that I'd missed on screen. Why that's true I don't know, but it is.

Thanks for the advice. Now I'll be putting on the coffee and sitting down at my laptop for an evening of revision.

Re: Thanks for the feedback

Hmm, 30 to 45 days to write 120K then about 3 months spent on revisions etc. This includes a months worth of leaving it sit--so I guess 60 days to revise.

Shawn

Re: Thanks for the feedback

And like most people, I find errors in hard copy that I'd missed on screen. Why that's true I don't know, but it is.

Absolutely. I can miss the most egregious of stupid mistakes - leaving a period off the end of a sentence, dropping 'the' or 'with' from dialogue - but if I print it out, I catch 'em. Just something about pixels on a screen, I suppose.

Book on it all

Katdad,
You might enjoy The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner.

See <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573228575/qid=1102306117/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-5727629-1097515" target="_new">here</a>

Good luck with your revise. You're in the company of greatness. <img border=0 src="http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif" />

Re: Book on it all

what i do and what i'm capable of are different things. i work a full-time job, so between that and family commitments, actual writing time is limited. it took me about five months to do the rough draft of the last book i wrote, which to me seemed extraordinarily long. i think, giving nothing else to do, i could have done it in half that time (134k words).

the editing and revisions took another two months, of which i'm not exactly done with just yet, but what's left should be just minour things, like going back and adding the small details i left out because i hadn't researched them just yet.

given a deadline with the promise of a paycheck at the end, i feel confident i could do an average sized book within six months start to finish if i buckled down and just did it.

editing actually takes me the longest amount of time, as i set up goals of cutting a specified amount of words out. whether i achieve the goal or not doesn't matter as long as the story is better for having tried it, and it almost always is.

to me, that's a second draft. to others a second draft entails total rewrites.

as an aside: the last book i felt something was lacking. what it truly was was that i felt blown-away by other writers. so i tried to study the differences in why i thought their stories were more effective than my own, particularly in descriptions, which i feel is my weakest aspect. one of the biggest differences, and really just about the only tangible thing i could nail down, was those were done in first-person. so, i tried writing a scene in 1st person and seeing where that lead me. turns out it was just a waste of time, but an interesting experiment for me nonetheless.

Re: Book on it all

I think it would take a lot less time if I did not get distracted with these forums.

Generally I start with a situation, and sometimes only the vaguest idea of plot. Still, it only takes me six to eight weeks to do the first draft. The only mechanical thing I do is to plot out the word count on Excel. Each day I do that (several times a day), and I try to keep a linear progression. Rewriting I generally do over a longer period, without any particular schedule. Most of the rewriting is in the first part of the book, because that’s were I didn’t quite know what I was doing or where I was going. Sometimes I’ll read similar books with writing I admire, and that gets me in the mood to edit, because it sharpens my eye to my own writing.

Re: Forum distraction

I think it would take a lot less time if I did not get distracted with these forums.

Click to expand...

Or if you didn't get thread drift... ha ha

Actually I find these forums a welcome break from the relentless task of reading my own dull prose. Sigh.

By the way, last weekend I was kidnapped by fierce female pirates, held for ransom (don't pay the ransom! I escaped!) and therefore my revision schedule has fallen a bit behind the curve.

Thankfully I built some padding into my estimate when I spoke to my agent.