In the midst of my revisions, I’ve been reading a great craft book, A Writer’s Guide to Fiction by Elizabeth Lyon.
In the book the author talks about two particular writing methods:
Hot writing. The method of getting the first draft done as quickly as possible. Not stopping a.k.a NaNoWriMo. Overcoming the fear of the blank screen by creating words without revision.
Meticulous writing. Careful writing. Revision-heavy. Several revisions of a page before writing the next page. Polishing every word until it gleams. Slower pace but less revision.
While both have their advantages of getting a novel done, they also have disadvantages.
Hot Wwiting may net a lot of words, but for some writers, the act of polishing and revising a whole novel can be too overwhelming. This is why many NaNoWriMo novels stay under the bed.
Meticulous writing may result in a lack of freshness because of over-writing or over-revising. Plus the quest for perfection can can prolong completing a novel for months or even years.
I’ve tried both and I’ve discovered that I really can’t do hot writing for a whole novel. While I do get a good draft, I usually end up trashing almost two- thirds of it and revising the rest. And with meticulous writing, it sparks my perfectionist bent and I can easily get caught up revising a chapter or a scene. Plus I’ve learned the hard way that until I’ve completed the novel, that polished chapter may still change or get cut out completely.
So for me what’s been working for this novel is a hybrid of the two. Hot write a scene and then revise. For my list of new scenes I’ve identified, I may even hot write several of them and then revise.
It’s still a work in progress.
Which one works best for you to complete a novel? Hot writing or meticulous writing? Or do you do a mixture of the two?
Karen, one of the disadvantages for me of being too meticulous was that it was hard to figure out where to fix it when it had problems, because the writing sounded so polished. I am trying to write my first drafts a lot faster, but I go back and revise a little each day before I launch into writing the new part.
I plot pretty carefully before I write. And when I’m writing a revise a little but not a ton, b/c while macro editing some scenes might change or be deleted, so why spend the time revising? I’m middle of the road. During the first draft, I write about 5K a week give or take. Slow and steady.
Andrea: Yes, this is what happened to me. Since I write in scenes, I try and get the scene down first but go back and revise — but even then when I hit a block, I stop and keep moving, knowing the I can always come back during another revision round.
Laura: I also learned the hard way that macro editing can be a waste of time because during the revision, the scene *always* changes (at least for me). Sometimes, it gets cut out completely and that time I spent obsessing over the structure could have been use to maybe hot write some other scenes.
I’m a bit of a combination. I do write pretty much straight through, but I often go back and edit and I do a lot of prethinking before that draft gets on paper too.
Not surprisingly, Book Twin, I’m also a hybrid of the two. I crank out a scene and then rework it before continuing on. Then, when I have a full draft, I go back and do more meticulous revisions. Then I revise some more, and some more, and some more…
I know exactly what you mean with the two different types of writing. I think I do better with hot writing, because I think I produce some pretty good stuff during NaNoWriMo - I may need to restructure a lot of it and clean it up, but it’s worth it. Also, I find when I’m trying to polish up or re-write a chapter, and it’s just not satisfying me, I find if I start with a blank page and re-write it in the “hot writing” fashion, I’ll get new ideas and a few good sentences that can really help that languishing chapter.
I’ve tried to hot-write, but I can’t. My over-active inner-editor won’t let me. We’ve reached a compromise. I write a chapter, and then I edit before I move on to the next. It seems to work for me - for now.