With Your Head, Not Your Heart

I first saw the movie Finding Forrester when I was in high school. At that time, I was already pretty serious about writing—I may have even been in the middle writing that first, super bad novel—so I connected with the movie far more than any of my friends. I still watch it sometimes and I’ll never forget some of the things it taught me about writing. One of those is Sean Connery’s character’s advice that you write the first draft with your heart and the second draft with your head…which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Since finishing my latest manuscript on May 17, I’d been putting off working on the first round of revisions. I felt like I needed space and time to let the thing sit, sort of like how a new house tends to settle over the years as it moans and groans, shifts and finally finds its place. Of course, I wasn’t planning to wait years to do revisions. Just a few weeks or so.

Well, between the fact that I was missing writing and that one of my critique partners was asking for pages, I didn’t wait weeks. Monday, I started working on revisions, keeping Sean Connery’s character’s advice in mind. First draft, heart…check. Second draft, head…umm….

In theory, I know many things to look for in revisions. A brief list of the big ones:

·       Telling, not showing—This damn concept is so elusive that I really can’t think of an example right now. I recognize it (most of the time) when I read it. Basically, you can’t just say it…you’ve gotta explain it, let the reader learn it.

·       Plot holes—I made a short list of these not long after I finished my first draft. Yeah, I’ll mention way back that there’s something going on with that character…but I’ll totally forget to explain later what it is. And vice versa. Sometimes I’ll have things happen later that I’ll need to explain or foreshadow earlier in the story. And then sometimes, I just miss things completely and jump from A to C.

·       Passive voice—Pretty much anything like she was hit by the ball is bad and has to be changed to the ball hit her. Oh, hey, that was passive. Nice.

·       Adverbs—These things used to run rampant in my writing until one of my CPs went through a whole chapter highlighting every one of them in yellow…which made the page GLOW. Quickly, inadvertently, breathlessly, etc. can be in there, just not in large numbers, just not where they aren’t necessary.

·       Sentences that just don’t make sense—This is something only I do…at least as far as I know. I get so wrapped up in what I’m writing that sentences run on, twist around each other, and come out at the end of the paragraph with no logic, no connection to the story, and no reason to be there.

·       Anything and everything else that jumps out at me.

I say I know these things in theory because I’ve been struggling with the whole second draft, head part—my heart just keeps getting in the way. It may be that I’m revising too close to finishing that first draft. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what this is. I need more time, a lot more time, because only then will I be able to look at this thing objectively.

So I’m going to push through to the end of this not-so-effective round of revisions. I’ll finish up the list of things I need to fix that I made in the short time between completing the first draft and now. After that, I’ll send this thing off to my critique partners. Once they have it, I’ll feel better about leaving it alone. They’re busy writing and querying and whatnot, so it’ll be awhile before they get back to me…which is good. Maybe then it’ll be long enough that I’ll be more objective in my revisions.