Revisions

It's taken awhile, but I'm slowly acquiring the ability to revise my manuscript. Revisions used to be so mindboggling that I simply didn't do them. Instead I had three works in progress stalled on the shelf.

Thanks to joining my Romance Writer's of America chapter, going to every monthly meeting for the past several years, soaking up the education sessions and taking in a few writers' retreats, it's all finally sinking in.

There's probably a very direct link to my collector's personality and my difficulty with turfing sections of my writing. I'm very Victorian in my love of clutter. I don't throw anything out very quickly. Including words.

But just as I've watched episodes of "Neat" and giggled over other people's crazily messy homes, I've begun to move more unused items out of our apartment. I used to be obsessed with aquiring more storage, but now I try also to move stuff along - through donating items, recycling and last on the list, ditching it entirely. My husband and I are making headway on our Merlin-the-Magician's-tower-of-topply-book-stacks style of decorating.

And I'm learning to turf the parts that don't work in my manuscript. The crafting part of writing is hard for those of us who feel like we're simply tuning in to a pre-existing story. Once I'd copied it all down, I never seemed able to get good reception for the "Revisions" channel.

Strangely, I never had this problem when I edited films at school. I took one look at a segment and trimmed whatever I didn't need. No internal arguments, for or against. So I've begun to look at my writing revisions as a cross between clearing away the piling books from the apartment, and trimming frames here and there from a film scene.

Maybe I'll look at revisions from yet another angle. I started poking around my garden the other day and saw buds on my roses. I love pruning them. I'll just think of revisions as a pair of pruning shears and my manuscript as a rambler rose. Nothing can get ramblers down for long. The pruning only invigorates the rose to new growth and more blooms.

Yes, I'll treat revisions like pruning and I'll have no trouble at all!