As you may or may not know, I’ve been working on revising Mik Murdoch: The Power Within for the past two months.
It has been a much more difficult thing to do than writing the original book. That is largely because, with every change I make, I need to first think about how it will impact the book. Does the change need to have anything added earlier so it makes sense? Will it breach some sort of continuiity later? If I add this scene, will I need to dispose of another scene further on?
All of these things mean that I am moving at a comparitive snails pace to how quickly I was able to write the book initially.
Does that mean I didn’t prepare well enough before I wrote the book? I don’t think so. As I have been told and said myself numerous times, you cannot edit what isn’t on the page. I could have spent months preparing and never written anything. Instead, I plotted the book and wrote it as well as I could. Now that it is done, I can see where things can be better.
I had a chat with another writer last night about revisions. He is also revising a second book and so we compared notes. His attitude is, the editorial notes and comments give him another chance to interact with the characters. I like that idea so I’m going to try and adopt the attitude myself. It might make ‘hard’ more ‘fun’.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
