I’ve been obsessing lately over the fact that it takes me too long to edit novels. The dumbest part of this is absolutely that I don’t actually even know what “too long” means on any level or how my editing compares with this mythical measurement. I’ve never tracked editing before so I have no sense at all of how long it actually takes me but it hasn’t stopped me from completely fixating on it. A big part of the problem is that I find myself comparing the time it takes me to edit a novel with the time it takes me to revise my plays and e-commerce work without stopping to acknowledge that all three are very different. I edit plays and e-commerce pretty quickly and it’s giving me a complex because it doesn’t transfer to novels.
But the obsession is there and I was determined to achieve it by sheer force of will. I would give myself exactly a month in which to have my Polar Twilight Adaptation novel ready for beta readers and, during that time, I would work on exactly nothing else. My logic was that I was creating the same circumstances a writer under a contracted deadline would have thus somehow training myself… or something. The logic was flawed. This was all very stupid for a variety of reasons and, to some extent, I knew that going in but I decided I would never get faster at revising unless I changed something up so I decided the experiment was worth doing.
My revision started on 3/15/2015. I am on day 38 of exclusivity as I write this and I’m calling it. I just can’t write like this. I’m going back to project hopping.
Did I make some progress on the revision? Yes. A ton, though it’s still nowhere near done. But the net effect was not positive. I’m behind on other, non-novel projects and I don’t even have a finished novel to show for it. Moreover, I’ve been frustrated for over a month and hated the entire process in a negative way I’ve never felt about writing before. I already knew I work better when genre hopping so forcing myself to commit to only one project drove me insane. I really think I would have gotten more revision done faster on multiple projects if I’d been able to organically go back and forth between projects as needed like I always do instead of bashing away at it stubbornly when my brain wasn’t having it.
The lesson here is to stick with what works for you.
Secondary lesson is that if I ever try writing monogamy again, someone please smack me.
Moreover, my whole brilliant plan disregarded the fact that the two writer’s whose revisions schedules I was trying to emulate a) had an editor to step in at some point to help them with the plot tangles and b) that those schedules reflected a consistent writing schedule on close to full time hours. In these 38 days, not counting research, I have put in exactly 50 hours so far. For a mom who’s just writing a minute here and there when the toddler allows alongside running an e-commerce company? That’s pretty freaking good (especially when you consider the toddler was sick for almost all of that month).
But the writers I was trying to mimic talked about spending 8 hours or more a day revising in dedicated solitude and I just can’t achieve those hours at this point in my life. I was so obsessed with hitting the deadline that I didn’t stop to think that a month of 8 hour days is a very different time frame than a month where I maybe will get an hour total over the course of the day and that’s only if I stay up way too late and never see my husband again and maybe I should stop beating myself up about not being able to magically achieve the same as others in 1/8 the time.
I’m not giving up, of course. I’m still trying to get this novel revision done as fast as I can. But I am going to stop trying to force myself to some arbitrary way I think I should be working and go back to what I know works for me. I’ll also be keeping better records of how my revision progresses this time so I’ll have some real data to back up my hysteria and in the hopes that, next time, I’ll at least have a sense of how long it does take me to edit and go from there.
In the meantime, I was counting this revision time towards Camp NaNoWriMo just to give myself an extra push and just passed 50,000 in that challenge tonight. I can’t deny it’s been a nice little kick in the pants to keep me moving when I wanted to burn it all down. Anyway, here’s where I am for the year as we enter the last week of April:
272,611 out of 500,000 words
It’s funny. I wrote a post on The Whine Seller a few weeks ago about how I always seem to forgot my own lessons when it comes to business and an experiment like this makes me realize that I do the exact same thing with writing too. I think I need to start posting giant notes where I can’t possibly miss them to remind me what I already know about myself…
In the meantime, just telling myself that I can start genre hopping again tomorrow has me downright giddy so I know it was the right decision!
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
