Season 2, Episode 24: Revision Is for Nuance
IN THIS EPISODE
“I feel like a vast majority of revising for me is staring at the words on the page and going… ‘You know, there are words there, and those words are probably OK! Can I just keep going?”
After last week’s episode with Molly B. Burnham, Abby considers taking her advice: Write with abundance. It's like the idea behind brainstorming that the bigger list, the more you have to choose from, and the better your chances are of hitting on something big. Maybe THAT is how you discover what mouse burps sound like.
We hit on the idea of using your kids (or other people’s kids!) as a sounding board if you’re writing a middle grades book. Abby was invited to her daughter’s class to read a portion of her book during Read-A-Thon week. It went swimmingly and one of the little boys in her daughter’s class wanted to buy the rest of her book!
Get specific, get specific – it’s what Jennie Nash told us all the time while we were writing our first drafts. You can’t write to everyone’s preference, so you may as well write to a specific audience and do it well. And sometimes even when you do that…your book is beloved by people outside that genre as well (i.e., our favorite series to reference, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter). Abby’s writing to a specific age group, and she thought she was writing towards girls, but she’s finding that boys are interested in her story too!
Kemlo points out some logistical issues in Abby’s submission which are pretty easily worked out, and we get to hear some favorite lines in her submission. “No need to buckle a horse into a car!”
“Revision is for nuance.”
Kemlo also adds that “revision is for nuance.” It’s OK (expected!) if you don’t get all the good stuff in on your first draft, or even your second – subsequent drafts are where the real fun begins—they’re for adding in little callbacks or developing characters and sub-plots, refining foreshadowing and perfecting plot.
