[ Silence ]
So in this particular instance, Nora’s mom said something snarky
to her, and Nora’s response is to hurt her back.
So, like, the last line of this paragraph is, “My mother
and I were good at being mean to each other. We had a lot of practice.”
And as I’m developing this idea and this conversation
that they’re going to be having, I’m saying things in my head, like,
oh my gosh, my mom would never say this to me,
and I would never say this to my mom.
But obviously, I’m not writing about
my relationship with my mom in terms of characterization.
The thing that I need to do, and I think that -- I mean,
there’s always a little bit of me in all of my characters.
There has to be. There’s no way around it.
So what I’m trying to do is figure out, if I had been in her shoes and raised
the way that she was with her mom in her situation, how would I respond?
Other people’s experiences of the world are going to
change the way that they respond to a situation.
Like, it’s the challenging part. It’s also kind of the fun part.
Because it lets me feel like I have a better understanding
of sort of the world as a whole or how, like, people work.
Really, whenever I’m revising, I just do whatever I can
to make myself think about the story differently.
If it’s physical, if it’s, you know, mapping things out
so that they make a little bit more sense.
I always, like, have two different versions of the draft
in front of me when I’m revising.
So whether it’s -- like, I have this one printed and I’m typing on this computer,
or I have this printed, and I’m writing in my notebook.
Just because literally looking at it in two different spaces
forces me to see it differently.
But usually I write a lot in the margins,
or I’ll have an elaborate, like, color-coded system.
So there are definitely times where, instead of one pen,
I’d have all of my crayons out and be drawing on it.
Actually, I do -- I have maps and charts of earlier drafts of this book at home.
Like, I’ll make, like, an idea web or a timeline.
I have, probably on here somewhere,
a calendar that I went -- actually went back, like, and picked a year.
Because it doesn’t really matter what year my book takes place in.
And I picked a year and went through and said, okay, well,
when would Labor Day be this year, and what day would the 4th of July be.
And Nora’s sister is pregnant when her husband dies.
So they’re going to, like, lots of doctor’s appointments
and doing all of these things. Well, if they go to
a doctor’s appointment on a Thursday, what day of the week -- or, like,
what day in the month is that, and how close is it to the 4th of July?
A lot of my revision process is figuring out some of those specifics
that I gloss over when I’m actually writing.
Because stopping to figure them out interrupts the process.
I wrote the first draft of this book in four or five months a few years ago.
I’ve been working on the revision ever since.
To me, revision is the fun part.
And it’s the majority of the process.
I like all the parts about writing.
I mean, I think that revision is the best part because that’s the part
where something that you have in your head starts making sense.
Like, hopefully, maybe to other people, but even just to -- like, when you
look at a page of a draft, and you feel like, oh, I can do so much better.
And then you sit down, and you start revising,
and you say, oh, wait, that’s the line.
Right? Like, that is what I needed to get out of this paragraph,
or that’s what this scene needed.
And it’s, like, solving these tiny, little mysteries.
When I sit down and I’m writing, I’m not thinking about anything else.
Like, I just kind of get lost in this a little bit.
And that’s the best part, really, to me.
But hopefully, that happens regardless of what stage the project is actually at.
Writing is a process.
So you don’t just sit down and spit something out, and it’s golden.
If that ever happens to you, high five.
Because I don’t know that it’s ever happened to me.
So that’s a big one.
Like, be willing and ready to engage in a process.
Like, revision’s an important part of writing.
It’s not separate from. It’s not in addition to.
It’s part of it.
Give yourself time to work on something.
Like, night before, not the time to start.
Maybe not even the time to finish.
Like, you maybe want to even be finished a couple days early
in case something comes up.
And if you follow those two pieces of advice --
process, not finishing the night before -- breaking things up and kind of
leaving yourself where you know what happens next.
Whatever you’re writing. If it’s, you know, creative writing
or a paper for a class or whatever, if you know what the next paragraph
is going to be, and you can sit down in an hour or tomorrow or in three days
or whenever and pick it up where you left off,
it’s going to be a lot easier than staring at a screen.
[ Silence ]