How long should it take to Revise/Edit to get to Good Enough?
Editing, to focus my question a bit. My goal is to turn a book around from concept to publishable in a 2 year time period. Currently the plan is to write a draft in a year and revise the following, starting the next draft while the first is in revisions. A sort of waterfall methodology to writing.
Currently, I have my first manuscript, 200,000 words, in alpha. Feedback has been slow, and I have a writing group that will take about 3 years to read it at the rate they plan on reading it (not good for my initial plan). It needs a lot of work based on the few reads I have gotten comments back on and I know I need to at least practice that work, but it may also be destined for the trunk.
I'm struggling with the time management aspect with the number of revisions I'm likely going to have to do. One character rewrite, one wholesale restructuring, and cutting about half the words out.
How long should a revision process take? When do you know it's time to put a book down and move to the next project? Suggestions on revision methodologies which support suggested timelines would help. I have high level revision objectives, but I am lacking process which may be causing my sense of swirl.
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Even if you're thinking of this as primarily a learning project, I would advise trying to get it into publishable shape rather than abandoning it and starting a new one. As you said, it's work you'll need to learn to do sooner or later. Given that, however, I'd say you'll want to be a little less rigid and formulaic in your revision expectations. You're starting with plenty of raw material, so I'd recommend "rewriting" by first editing down to a tightly plotted core, and then filling in any remaining gaps. (Note: I found this revision plan by following links from @DPT's answer, but it seems excellent to me.)
As far as when to stop the revisions, my advice is to rewrite until either a) you think the book is publishable or b) your revisions are not making it any better (for instance, if your new rewrites are undoing old ones, or if you've reworked so much, you've lost the original work). If you're not sure, and an arbitrary timeline helps you, go with it. After that, however, try to publish. You won't really know if you're done or not until you see if someone will publish it.
Two years total, one for writing, one for rewriting, sounds completely reasonable to me. Once you know yourself better, your estimates will improve. It's hard to give more exact numbers given that some successful authors (Jack Kerouac) hardly revise at all, while others (Orson Scott Card) continue revising years after publication. I would suggest, however, that you conceptualize "writing" as including the revisions (unless you want to end up with an endless supply of unpublishable first drafts). In addition to the psychological shift, this also encompasses the reality that some people write quick first drafts, and need more revision time, while others write more slowly but revise less.
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I personally would NOT recommend writing a second book while revising the first. It is important to keep the first book in your head as a whole, a second book in my head would result in a jumbled and useless edit due to forgotten or mistaken plot threads and characters.
Pro writers that do a book a year do it raw start to final finish. Multi-tasking doesn't save you any time or make you type faster, it just reduces the quality of your work on both things. If you have 2000 hours in a year to write, spending 25% on revision and 75% on writing means you can't finish a book in a year that takes 2000 hours to write!
Also, give your group one chapter to read, and get feedback, and revise it, and give them the revision, and get feedback, and revise it.
If you are worried about the character arcs and plots, write what Hollywood calls a "treatment" of your novel. A screenplay in Hollywood is typically 110 pages or so. A treatment is a 3-5 page summary of every plot line and character arc, not written as either prose or an outline, but a kind of summary of each scene the screenwriter envisions, so it reads like a "just the facts" short story. It gives all the main beats of the story and does reveal any twists or surprises and the ending. It seldom includes any dialogue, except perhaps iconic lines: "I'll be back."
You can see that this is around 3.5% of the finished page count, so similarly, try writing for your 200K words a 7000 word treatment of your entire story. Go through all your scenes, count them, and divide 7000 words by the number of scenes you have. Devote that many words to the beats (an important point) in each scene, as part of the short story of your novel.
That treatment can be used to help you identify problems in the plot or characters, or identify scenes that are worthless, and your summary of what the scene does can be your guide to rewriting that scene: you know what it is supposed to accomplish so you can better cut the fat.
In your summary, look for repetition (unnecessary) and opportunities to combine partially matching scenes into a single scene, reducing word count.
In any case, revise your treatment to tell the same story in about 3500 words.
THEN give the revised treatment to your group; hopefully you can reduce it to 3000 or 4000 words, as it should be for a novel. Tell them what it is and get critiques on that, for the plot and characters, since they should be revealed by the treatment.
Use the feedback on a representative chapter as your lessons in actually writing prose and dialogue better, and use the feedback on the treatment as your lessons in plotting and story structure and character development.
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