HTRYN: Getting to know what I wrote.

A month after I started How to Revise Your Novel, how do I feel about it?

It's an eye-opener. It was designed to be just that, a course that makes the student look at their novel differently - taking it apart methodically, detaching themselves from their beloved characters in order to figure out where it went wrong and where it went right. This approach might not be right for everybody, but it appeals to me a lot. Stars Shine Brighter, though I love it still, is fraught with too many obvious mistakes and shortcomings to ignore. It's just not a very good story at that point. What's on the paper is nowhere near as shiny as what's in my mind, and even that is quite confused, so fixing it is no luxury.

Because Holly Lisle used to be a nurse, working in the ER, she uses medical metaphors to describe throughout the course. Your novel is an ER patient, who has just come in after a car-crash (or train-wreck, depending on how messed up it is). The first two months of the course, Lessons One to Eight (although it may take a lot longer than a week to work through some of the lessons), she defines as Triage, when the doctor/writer examines their patient/novel and figure out what is wrong with it.

During that first period, as a HTRYN student, you go through a number of re-reads of your novel in order to give the appropriate diagnosis (most likely it'll be diagnoses, really). Only after this long period of analysis, do you get to start making changes. Why? Because as you read your manuscript and identify its fault, sudden realisations about your work are bound to come and WHACK you around the head pretty much all the time. These are so common (and awesome!) that they even have a name on the HTRYN forums. They are the EUREKA MOMENTS!*

I will talk about the rest of the course when I get to it, but for now, let me tell you about my first few weeks of dissecting my novel.

How To Revise Your Novel, Lesson One:

Holly tells you straight up, when you read your first lesson, that it's probably the hardest one you'll have to go through. I don't know about future lessons yet, but I hope it's true because Lesson One was pretty though. Even after I had been warned that certain lessons may take longer than others to tackle, I was a bit shocked to find that Lesson One took me more than three weeks.

Lesson One isn't titled Magic, Despair and Grace for nothing. I thought I would stop several times and then I went on the boards, got some encouragements from graduates of the course and threw myself back into the task. I filled out the many worksheets, answering questions - What did I want my novel to be when I started? What is it like now? What came to life unplanned as I wrote it? - making notes on my manuscript every time I read something of notice - Is this good characterisation/bad characterisation? Why did this bit turn out to be so good/bad?, etc...

For me, the lesson highlighted many things that I suspected were wrong with the book and helped me see why. Because using the worksheets forced me to be methodical, it also squashed any illusions I could have, any argument I could try to oppose. Some of my characters are straw men and women. Some are flat, one-dimensional or just completely not what I would like them to be. Some bits of the plot make no sense and some elements I was fond of are just not shown at all. But I also know how this came to happen - hurrying through Nano, I left all the good stuff in my head and what made it to paper was mostly info-dumps, plot-holes and weak characters.

This may sound like it should be a depressing experience. But isn't the idea behind Nano that 'You can't revise a blank page'? Well, neither can you fix something if you don't know what's broken.

I know I'm explaining this all in foggy terms, but if I went into details this post would be even longer and I couldn't do justice to the course anyway. More on Lesson two coming up as I complete it!


*The Eureka moments are also referred to as epiphanies very often, but I favour the more science-y, less religiously-charged term. Shocker.