Bridge over troubled waters

The question has come up on Quora several times about revise-as-you-go writing. Seems it is more common than not. There are writers who prefer the sprint-to-draft, but the rest of us seem to do some amount of fixing as we go.

Most of my revising is, however, before I write. It seems to work for me, no matter how agonizing it is at the time. What I mean is, when I go into a new sequence (scene, chapter, whatever) I have an outline that tells me more-or-less what is to happen, but I have questions how to approach it.

Sometimes those questions open up into larger questions about the book. The last one was one of those. I'm at 60K out of a target of 70-75K, so funny thing, I'm in the place where all those threads I've been developing all come together. Where certain subplots get wrapped up, too.

But here's where the revise-before-you-go is really working for me. I'd sat on this next chapter for over a week and in that time I came up with but ultimately rejected a half-dozen approaches. Had I been of the draft-first-don't-collect-200-words philosophy this would have been a half dozen drafts. I would have written each of them out, then looked back over to see how it didn't work.

Or maybe not. I have an approach now that I almost certainly would not have come up with in outlining. It depends too much on threads that simply weren't there or weren't prominent. On ideas that came out during the actual writing of the previous chapters. It remains an open question if I would have come up with this approach through the multiple drafts and revisions method. Probably. I can't help feeling, though, that as much as it felt as if I was making no progress, this was a faster way to go.

And, heck, it is iteration. By which I mean it is a lot easier to correct a one-sentence synopsis than it is to correct a thousand-word scene built on that idea.

So I've got a new version. The Panto stuff is now essentially diary-free and focused on the Panto -- and on the Athena Fox problem. Then I finish up the Detectorist sub-plot and use them to talk about Diary Fever and the way Penny has gotten entwined with Linnet, and the way Linnet is heading into dangers she is yet too naive to understand. And I also get a chance to do a sort of recap/catch up for the reader who has gotten lost and can't quite remember where this whole 1941 story came from and why it is taking up a chunk of the narrative.

Now if I can just resist the urge to drop more Simon and Garfunkle references...

(I did finally explain that; in the scene where someone name-drops Time Team they also explain about the TV show Detectorists).

And oops. To really get all this stuff right, I should really finish reading my books on the Aux Units and the SOE...and finish watching the first few episodes of Detectorists.