Eye-Opening
For the first revision of my thesis, I am trying something my thesis advisor recommended: retyping it. So, after taking a red ink pen to one hundred seventy five pages of text, I committed myself to retyping every word, reviewing my notes changes and getting a different perspective on my novel. It’s a lot of work. The typing feels rougher than typing it out in the first place felt.
But it helps.
Not only have I gotten a deeper look at sentences and grammar, I’ve caught details I missed on the read-through. For example, I’ve found a logic flaw in a third hand retelling of an event, the accidental revelation of a plot point some twenty pages too early and a closing line that was not only unnecessary in its scene, it undercut the power of the moment.
I’m just under two-thirds the way through retyping the manuscript, and I feel that I am somehow more in the middle of the story itself than I have been. I feel like a mechanic, inspecting the joints and fittings for wear, which is funny, because that’s an end-stage metaphor for an early-stage revision.
And this is an early stage. I’ve heard from my thesis advisor, and he has raised several points that need to be addressed. On the scale of issues, though, these are minor. I had been half-afraid he would come to me and tell me something like, “the plot has holes I could drive through” or “the world-building doesn’t work at all” or some other large-scale, basic flaw that would send me back to square one. Instead, it seems that my first draft has formed a solid foundation, but now it’s time to build the novel on that foundation.
Some of what he mentioned I have already fixed. That’s a sign about my own progress in the program. Some of his points, though, slipped past me entirely, and I might never have caught them without his notice. This is the great benefit of the thesis process, and I am very happy right now that I made the call to start a whole new project for it. This way, I find out where my blind spots are. Next I get to learn how to tilt my mirrors to eliminate them.
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Submissions Update: since my last post I have submitted to Shimmer, Midnight Screaming, Reed Magazine, Storyglossia, and Bacopa.
