Revision without Tears ....................................................................

Lecture 22

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up in the thrill of discovery, creating unique situations and characters.
Whatever frustrations you may experience in the act of creation are offset
by the sheer pleasure of making something new. But then, having created a
beautiful, imaginative draft, you have to sit down and look for everything
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them in such a way that the reader never knows there were any mistakes to
begin with. It can be hard and unpleasant work, but in this lecture, we’ll look
at strategies for revision that can make it less intimidating.

The Daunting Task of Revision
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your draft on every level, more or less all at once. It’s the one time
in the whole process where you cannot avoid having to think about
everything. You have to ask yourself not only if the entire narrative
works as a whole, but if all its individual parts do what they’re supposed
to do and whether they all pull in the same direction. Is each character
complete and believable? Are the point of view, verb tense, and setting
appropriate? Does each chapter and scene round off and lead to the
next? Are your sentences interesting, elegant, and memorable?

z One way to make this daunting task less intimidating is to prepare for
revision from the very start. The motto “Bash it out now and tart it up
later” is a reminder to forge ahead energetically, but it also serves to
underscore the idea that getting the story down on paper is only the
beginning of the process; you will have to “tart it up”—change things—
later on.

z Composing and revising are inextricably linked, and how you revise
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