Revision

I've been hearing a lot of talk about the revision process lately. Some authors, especially independent ones, are talking up the fact that they don't revise much, if at all. They simply revise as they go. Of course this saves a ton of time and the authors are able to put out more work that way. And work is content and content is money. Or, as the old cliche goes, content is king.

As for me? I come from the old school which pretty much dictated that you spend an entire year, minimum, on a novel of say, 60K words. Never was this arduous process more apparent in writing school (I did my MFA in Writing at Vermont College in the mid-90's) where my writing profs would grill me on a manuscript and all too often I'd be forced to go back to the drawing board starting with word one. This proved an invaluable experience for a young fiction writer of 29 or 30 years old. There is no better schooling than having to take beating after beating yet still persevering when many others would simply pack it up and head out to law school.

For all I know, student enrollments in MFA programs could be down or for all I know they could be way up. Whatever the case, publishing a book is no longer an achievement or at times, a seemingly impossible achievement. It's more a matter of course. Taken a step further, authors have choices like never before. For instance, over the course of the next three years, I will have three books published traditionally in hard-cover. The books will be in all the bookstores, and the novels will receive the usual trade reviews (good or bad), and all will be well. Twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, I would have focused entirely on those three books and spent the in-between time doing something else, like freelance writing or teaching or even writing a short story or two. Hell, maybe I'd do nothing.

But now, I can publish those three books, sign another contract with yet a second publisher, and on top of that, put out any number of books, novellas and short stories under my own label, Bear Media. My choices at that point are thus: do I go exclusive to Amazon KDP or do I go wide with a distribution outlet like Draft2Digital? In the end, I usually do both.

Choices...as a full-time author, you gotta love them.

But this revision thing bothers me a little. I take my work seriously, and I only want my best work to be published, no matter what form that publishing takes. Sometimes this takes serious revision. Sure, I'm a fast writer, and very prolific, but I also take the time to revise. So much so that I've driven some of my publishers crazy by insisting the galley proofs be gone over again, and again, and again, even if it means pub dates must be extended (in one case I insisted a book be revised post-publication!). In any case, it could be that I publish too much material. One of my publishers recently told my agent that "Vince is over extending himself."

Whatever...

Writing is what I do. I do it fast. But not at the expense of the revision process. Listen up writers, your books will remain long after the worms have had their day. Make sure it's as good as you can make it.

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