Neverending Revisions

“You will obtain your goal if you maintain your course.”

fortune about goals

Remember when I had my New Year goals? Well, I’m a bit behind schedule. The only thing I’ve gotten done is getting the research books for my next Taiwanese YA novel (not reading them, mind you, just having them sit prettily on the bookshelf).

They say half of writing (if not more!) is revising. It’s funny how I’ve gone through my manuscript so many times, gotten other eyes on it, and I still manage to constantly tweak words and sentences. My projected finish date was February to edit it all, but it’s now the end of the month, so I’m definitely going past that self-imposed deadline.

At the same time, I’m also slowly polishing a novella with my local writers’ group. I’ve also submitted a Winston Wong short story to a few magazines, but no word so far….

I’m not creating any new content, though, and that always makes me feel unwriterly. Unless…would you count rewriting as writing?

Hope you all are pursuing your goals with much diligence!

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Comments

  1. Rewriting is writing, so no guilt, keep on keeping on.:)

  2. Of course revising counts as writing! Nothing would get done without it. I applaud your commitment and perseverance.

  3. Rewriting is writing. I’m in the same boat, Jennifer. I am in the fourth draft of my YA novel before having finished the first. I explain: I wrote 50 000 quite quickly. Then I started to share chapter after chapter with my critique group. Their comments triggered immediate revision. So instead of moving on, I returned to the beginning and started to revise. I read yesterday a blog post about the 25% rule. The writer explained that for her each novel was three sections of 25% or 25 000 words and that she always stop at the first 25 000 and already revised. Then she did the same for the next 25 000 and so on. It looks like I’ve doing that as well. I don’t really think there are rules. What I’m doing for this novel is new to me. It just happened while my manuscript was being critiqued, and I’m glad because I would have been too far before realizing that I had to include important elements of plot way sooner than I had originally.
    So good luck to you and see you at the finish line. Back to work now!

    • Jennifer J. Chow says

      Wow, Evelyne. I tend to write my whole draft first, but it makes sense to get valuable critiques and then revise before you end up putting all the plot points in. Thanks for your take on things!

  4. I agree with Alvarado… don’t feel guilty. As long as you’re not using revision to avoid something, but I don’t think that’s the case as productive as you’ve been the past few years. I think it’s great to have goals to help keep focus, but we can’t beat ourselves up over them too much either. (or perhaps I say this because I’m not quite on target myself…)

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