I don’t know how many of my readers are actually aware of what happens between “Yeah, the book is written!” and “uff, it’s ready for layout or even print” … or from “Yeah, cool idea for a book” all the way to “uff, the manuscript is finished – in draft.”
Maybe I should have started with the latter – which already drops us right into the subject: the – at least for me – dreaded revision = to look at again (literally translated as “look again”), in order to correct or improve.
If you’re now thinking, “Sure, so all the spelling mistakes aren’t still in there afterwards” – far from it. I have a professional proofreader for that. Revision is about checking whether everything else works. And yes, there’s a lot of “everything else” – to make sure a book doesn’t put you to sleep, or have you angrily throw it into the corner because it’s illogical or the story doesn’t make sense.
The story: of course, a book should have one 😉 But it also has to be logical within itself, plausible in the reality of the book world, and comprehensible for the reader. And of course exciting … and here’s the first real sticking point: things are exciting when they raise questions we want the answers to. So the answers must not be obvious, otherwise it’s not exciting.
On the other hand, everything has to be understandable and consistent, otherwise the reader first loses track and then loses the will to keep reading. And it has to be honest – at least from my point of view – meaning not insulting the reader’s intelligence by explaining the obvious, but also not cheating by letting solutions appear through unknown facts or other inelegant tricks.
I love the challenge that revision brings – because here I go through all of this: scene by scene I look at what happens, what the purpose of the scene is, and what open questions remain at the end of the scene. Questions like “Who was Croix trying to shoot, who did he really want to kill?” or “What kind of being is Thorn, really?” – just to pick out a couple of the really big ones.
I not only have to know the answers to all these questions, I also have to make sure they are answered, and at the right time (often piece by piece), and that the answer fits in every respect with all the other facts of the story and of the characters.
Just to give you a sense of scale: the book I just finished has 132 scenes, and at the end of each one there are about 3–6 questions … so altogether, quite a lot 😊
The characters: the heart and the backbone of my books. There are many of them, even if I only look at the main and most important supporting characters. And with them, there are many perspectives from which parts of the story are told. Not every character has their own POV, but still about 8–10 per book.
Of course, they also have stories: their own life histories, their relationships with one another, and all of them have their roles in the larger story of each book and across many books. So they don’t just have names, hair colors, and favorite foods, but also their individual goals, wishes, fears, likes and dislikes, absurd sense of humor or none at all, talents and weaknesses, a past and hopefully also a future – and they have secrets and connections to other characters – which is sometimes one and the same.
And what happens with them in revision? Their character development is reviewed: where the character stands at the beginning of the book, what they want, what difficulties they must overcome, how they change, where they end up – and whether all that fits with the character and their role in the story.
But above all, it’s through them that we experience the story and the world. Through their eyes, readers see the world – and so do I, which is why it’s a good thing there are so many of them, because the SpaceWorld is far more than it seems at first glance…
The SpaceWorld: in other words, the worldbuilding. Even though at the beginning of book 1 some readers might think, “SciFi? Hm… this all seems pretty normal” (like Peter Parker before the spider bite – okay, Steve gets his spider bite already in line one … but no one knows that), a few years in the future but otherwise … and then, little by little, sides of the world appear that are anything but everyday for us. But this kind of slow-burn worldbuilding while you’re reading is a constant challenge when writing: because even though I’ve already designed a lot of this world (all the way to Genesis 2.0), the reader discovers the world beneath the everyday – not really slumbering so much as simmering – as small pieces of a larger puzzle. And it’s important to put those together correctly.
The structure: does the setup work, the chosen tense and the narrative perspectives, and are they consistent throughout? Does the pacing work – meaning, how fast or slow the story is told – does it fit the content, and is there enough variety = dynamics?
The language: this is the last step – and even here it’s still not about spelling or grammar. It’s about the tone, which has to fit the story, the genre, the respective character. About the dialogue, which should sound natural – no, you don’t get that by writing it exactly the way people talk 😉 Is the language suited to the genre in terms of complexity, choice of words, etc.?
And in the end … does it sound fluid and right? That’s where the read-aloud test comes in … yes, I sit here and read the book aloud to the dog and the cat!
When I read it like this, it does sound like a lot of work – and it is. And you get the feeling it never ends, because there’s always something that could be clearer, funnier, or more mysterious. But at some point you have to take the last difficult step: let go of the book and send it off to editing or proofreading, knowing that now it’s finished and what comes next is only correction of correctness.
The most remarkable thing about revision for me is that before I start, I am absolutely sure that the book is finished in terms of story and character lines, and I know I’ll only change little things – and that is indeed the case – and yet by the end, so many new things have come out of it: small and large connections I suddenly recognize, new links for future books, backstory I hadn’t worked out before for this area and that suddenly surfaces and fits perfectly … or even a character who suddenly develops into another, or one who unexpectedly shifts from a minor extra in one book into a player in another.
In short: I know exactly what happens before I start, similar to writing the draft … but exactly how it happens or how it all connects with everything else, I only know once the revision is finished.
And that makes revision, in the end, exciting for me too – because here, I get to discover my book all over again.
Kommentar hinzufügen
Kommentare