Let’s talk revisions!
…
Ok, I’m done.
And your opinion is…?
Haha.
Ok, so April was planned to be my “revision” month. I was going to use Camp NaNoWriMo to motivate me to revise the first draft of my YA novel. I had big plans to take the feedback I’d been given, on some of my earlier chapters (curtesy of my Bali feedback group), and use that advice to revise the entire manuscript.
That was before I didn’t finish the MS in earlier months.
Then my plan was to take the feedback from my beta readers and revise and reorder my poetry. I found a few mistakes that needed tweaking, plus I wanted to move them around a bit, so I was motivated to do that instead- again, using Camp Nano to motivate me to stay focused, of course.
That was before life happened.
I was so proud of myself for planning ahead at the start of this year. I planned to get most of the difficult stuff out of the way in the first few months, allowing me a break in the middle, before going back to the grind later in the year. I had it all figured out, breaking up my tasks into smaller steps, and making sure to jump from one thing to the next so I wouldn’t get bored or lose momentum.
But, you know what I didn’t plan for? Life. Space to breathe. The chance that something bigger and more taxing might take priority and everything else would have to wait.
And that’s what happened.
For those who don’t know, I fell pregnant at the start of this year. And while I am a big believer that a woman can still do everything she wants to when pregnant or as a mum, what I didn’t account for was the idea that all those things might have to be done at a slower pace. When I first started getting symptoms, I went from 100km p/h to slamming the breaks at a busy intersection. Exhaustion and nausea hit me like a tone of bricks, and I had to learn to slow down, and reprioritise. My writing had to wait. An entire blog post was postponed. Books went unread, and unwritten and my focus was solely on my health.
What does that have to do with revision?
Well, I could tell you that my lesson from this month was still to take care of myself. That I did a little, but not a lot, but that it all still counts, so even though I didn’t “succeed” I still call it a “win”. (For the record, I printed up all my poems, cut them up, sorted them into vibes, and began sorting. I just didn’t finish sorting/ordering, and then transfer those changes onto the computer.)
But what I really learned this month was that sometimes what we think will be easy is actually hard, and vise versa. I chose to change my focus to my poetry because it required very little brain power (compared to novel revisions). The idea was a quick rearrange with a few grammatical edits, and presto change-o, we’re done. But once I pulled it apart and started working on it, I realised that if I wanted to do it, I should want to do it RIGHT- and that required focus. (After 30 minutes on the floor I had sorted 50 poems, had a huge back ache, and started to realise that the more I worked on it the more work it would be.)
Not only was this months’ challenge harder than I was expecting, but the past four months has been harder than I was expecting. Not because each task was beyond me, but because once I was a little off track it was hard to get back the momentum and push forward.
So, this is your reminder… To plan realistically. To take breaks. To allow some space in your life for surprises. To be flexible with your plans.
In May I am challenging myself to go old school and do some journaling. Honestly, as I type this, I haven’t even started this months challenge. I had forgotten what my May challenge was going to be, and since I’ve been so far behind, I dreaded looking it up. But I choose my monthly challenges for a reason, so I am going to persevere.
The point of Mays journaling challenge is to get back to writing. Not storytelling, or plotting, or getting inside a character’s head. Just the simple act of putting pen to paper and enjoying that moment.
When was the last time you wrote, just for the sake of writing? Try it for a few weeks and see how you feel. Maybe you’ll have a clearer mind. Maybe you’ll find that writing “spark” you’ve been missing. Maybe you’ll find the answer to a plot hole in a novel you put aside years ago because you’ve been so blocked. Maybe you’ll discover a love for journaling you didn’t know was there.
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