How to Revise While Writing a First Draft
Add comment February 8th, 2008
Don’t.
That’s right; don’t revise while you’re writing your first draft. One of the most important things I’ve learned about writing is that first drafts don’t have to be perfect. Their whole purpose is to get the story out of your head and down onto paper. If you go back and try to revise before you’ve finished the story, you’ll never get the story done because you’ll bog yourself down in getting it “perfect”. Holly Lisle, in her Writing Updates newsletter said “If you’re revising an unfinished novel, you’re putting wallpaper on a house that doesn’t have a roof.” That is so true.
So, what do I do when I find myself realizing I need to revise something, or if I can’t remember something and don’t want to stop the flow of writing? I make a note to myself in the manuscript. For example, while doing either Chapter 10 or 11 of TMA, I introduced a new supporting character and, as I am prone to do, I forgot to write her name, description, and so on and add it to my notes. I have her reappearing in Chapter 13, and I didn’t want to stop and spend time looking through the previous chapters so I put the notation “
Why did I do that? To remind me that I needed to look up her name and put it in when doing the revisions. I used the pointy brackets because they’re not something that gets used often, so if I do a search for an < on the file, it'll take me to a place I need to do some work. Why did I color the text? To make it easy to find when reading over the hard copy. Why green? Because green is encouraging. Green means go. And green isn't red, which is the color editors use. 
I use the same technique if I find myself stuck in a scene. I know what needs to happen, but the words aren't coming. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, because if I do, I'm not moving forwards with the story. So I type in what's supposed to happen in the scene, put it between the pointy brackets, color it green and then move on.
If there's something I need to remember to do that I just thought of, I make a pointy bracket green note in the text when I think about it. For example, Alex and Jarred are talking about the field of dreams I won't go into what the field of dreams are (and what they are in my book) here, but they're comparing the FoD to the world they live in, which they call the living lands. At one point, I'd called the the waking lands, but changed my mind. When I found myself typing "waking lands", I made a note to myself to go through and make sure I used living lands, not waking lands.
It also helps to put notes into the manuscript like that for when I give out the first draft to my writing group for comments. It lets them know that things aren't finished, and sometimes they even take time to give me some suggestions. I don't think I've said nearly often enough how much I love my writing group.
Okay, to sum everything up, don't revise while you're writing your first draft. Instead, put notes to yourself in the manuscript - or however else you keep track of changes you need/want to make - and keep moving.
And now I turn the floor, so to speak, over to you. How do you deal with writing your first draft and realizing you need to make/want changes?
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