The thing they don’t tell you

The thing they don’t tell you about revising a novel is that it totally sucks.

I think it will be fun to really polish this piece — to make the sentences nice and neat, to come up with more descriptive phrases and evocative imagery, to make the humor sharper — but this current stage of revision is a lot clunkier than that. This week, I deleted twenty pages. That was brutal. I have to rewrite the ending, and there are about ten pages at the bottom of the document under the header: “NO HOME.” So I have to find a home for those pages, or else delete them.

And when I’m finally through, when I’ve finally made it through the entire book and made all of the changes I thought I needed to make, I’ll go back to page one and start revising all over again.

Sometimes I feel like the only thing worse than writing is not writing.

2 responses to “The thing they don’t tell you”

  1. Rob Avatar
    Rob

    when you delete pages, do you save them in another file called “deleted pages,” or do they just disappear?

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    1. Ben Crawford Avatar
      Ben Crawford

      Thanks so much for the question, Rob.

      They disappear. It’s hard to press the delete button, but when you do… bliss.

      The only exception is for paragraphs I think I might use later. Those go to the bottom of the document.

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