I used to hate revising. Hate. It. With a passion. But when you have to do something over and over and over again, you kind of have to make peace with it. And if you’re lucky, you even start to like it. Truth is, revising has become my favorite part of writing. Here’s why.
When I’m writing completely new text, I feel like a sculptor with a giant hunk of marble. Making that marble take on some kind of recognizable shape isn’t easy. You’ve got so many things to choose from, so many angles and tools and possibilities. That part is hard.
But once you’ve hammered away for a while, then you’re got something you can actually make beautiful. So you chip and shape and polish, making your roughly-shaped lump into art. That’s the process I love. That’s what revising is for me.
So when a draft comes back all bloodied with comments or stacked in the margins with track changes, I don’t mind digging in. Sure, I may check Facebook and Twitter a lot as I go, but those marks give me things to think about. Ways to make what I’ve written better. I can honestly say I’ve only hammered away at one manuscript until it was something so completely different from it’s original outline that I didn’t love it anymore. And you know what? That manuscript didn’t sell.
The good news is, in a year or two, it may just become a brand new lump of marble all over again.