I am the mask you wear / It's me they hear

Admittedly, revising has never been something I've been very good at. I tend to not want to go back through and revisit something I've written. Though I've found that more often than not, revising my fiction is easier than, for instance, revising a literary paper.

I'm deep into revising part one of my novel. Sometimes I come to a scene or a half-chapter that needs nothing. (Well, at least, at the moment I see nothing that needs fixed / changed / deleted / added. That may change on draft 3.) But something, as what happened with chapter 3, I scratch nearly the entire thing and rewrite.

What I find myself rewriting mostly in this revision process are conversations. I realized several conversations are repetitious. My goal in this draft 2 project is to streamline the story. That is, I want to make sure I'm not repeating ideas or conversations, that I'm introducing new elements to the story rather than rehashing the same ones again and again. This I am having difficulty doing.

For the record, I revise by hand. I like the feel of a pen in hand and marks on the page and the general chaos of scribbling out and writing and big xes through the page when I delete a great big chunk. It makes me feel as though I accomplished something. And believe me, with this not really working a job thing, I need to feel as though I accomplished something.

I believe it was Donald Miller in his book Blue Like Jazz who said: I wondered whether or not I was lazy. When you are a writer you feel lazy even when you're working. You can write all day and still not feel that you have done anything.