Patti O'Shea's Blog

I started talking about revisions on Thursday and I thought I’d say a little more today. What I mentioned in that previous post is all normal and happens with every book, but my other revision task is far from my usual MO.

I always know whose book it is before I start writing. (One character always has a bigger growth arc than the other one. With my early books, I tried making the arcs equal, but I always had one character becoming more prominent and the other throttling back, so it’s never worked out that way on the page. But this is another post for some other day.) That’s what Pre-Book and all the thinking I do beforehand is for–to know the who, what, and why. This time, I had it wrong.

In all the scenes I was seeing (and I was seeing a lot of them), my heroine seemed so together and 90% of what I was getting at this point was from the hero’s Point of View (POV). Both these things made me believe he was the one who needed to change the most. Only he wasn’t sharing what his issue was. I didn’t even have a hint. I came up with ideas that could be it, but they weren’t. Finally, after thinking and pressing him, I figured it out. Yea!

Too bad it turned out to be really lame when I was trying to write the synopsis. Yes, it’s an issue. Yes, it’s something that won’t be easily resolved, but I knew it would be a challenge to make work for the reader. It’s exacerbated by the fact that h/h have never talked about it. The hero’s reasons for not saying anything work for him (and for me), but for a reader? I’m not so sure about that.

An SOS was sent to my writing friends. The suggestion was to focus on the heroine’s issue in the synopsis.

But she doesn’t really have an issue.

I knew that was wrong. All characters have issues even if they’re not working on them. I thought harder and came up with something. Hmm. I’d realized this before–pieces of it, at least–but I brushed right past them as being unimportant. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the heroine had a major issue. So major that it’s her book.

It was quite a revelation.

A couple more conversations later and the story shifted. It’s still the same story, the same plot elements, but the focus is different. And because of this, I have to rework the proposal chapters (the first three chapters of the book) with the heroine’s growth arc in mind.

The things that kind of felt sort of wrong earlier? Yeah, they’re completely wrong in light of this new revelation. Now I know why they felt off. When will I learn to trust my instincts?

I finally finished the synopsis from hell last Sunday. All synopses are horrible to write, at least for me, but this one was far worse than usual and I had to slog my way through it. I’ll have to revise it since I came in much longer than I intended, but for now, I get to revise the proposal chapters.

There are a few things that are on the list to handle. This is typical. Stuff often crops up as I’m writing the synopsis that requires some adjustment in the chapters. Sometimes it foreshadowing, sometimes it’s details, but there’s usually something. Then there are revision comments from one of my writing buddies. Things that I knew, but forgot to explain for the reader (oops!), shifting stuff around, layering. Nothing that should be too difficult–really–but I realized something about myself.

I always feel overwhelmed after reading revision notes, no matter who they come from.

I kind of had to remind myself that this is normal and happens every book. What I need to do is read comments and do nothing else that day. Just let my brain simmer overnight. By the next morning, I usually can wrap my arms around what needs to be done, but I always need that 24 hours to process.

And yes, it did happen this time, too. I felt overwhelmed as I looked at all the comments, but by the next day, I was breaking it into chunks to help myself work out how to attack the changes. I’m not talking chapters here or even scenes. I’m chunking it down to scene segments, for example the beginning to where my heroine has her number called (she’s waiting in line).

Revising 20 pages might seem overwhelming, but revising a couple of pages? Much more mentally doable.