Lessons on the Finishing Process đ¸ - Issue #5
When you care about professional-grade work, the thing you think is a finishing process may end up being yet another, intensive revision and even re-writing process.
For most of March, I was in residence as part of LOATADâs inaugural West African Writers Residency Programme, with three other writers, all of whom were working on vastly different individual projects. We spent our days mostly writing, reading, eating, and sleeping, during the four weeks of freedom the residency afforded us.
I spent most of my time working on a novella manuscript and learning a lot about what it takes to see a longform writing project through to near completion. Finishing a manuscript isnât as straightforward a process as it seems. Several times, I think Iâm finally done, and it turns out, Iâm actually not.
Before the Residency
I started working on this novella manuscriptâletâs call it Project Yâin maybe January 2021. It was meant to be a short story, maximum 6,000 words. As it stands now, the manuscript is nearly 25,000 words because, well, some stories are stubborn.
Throughout 2021, no-one outside the literary agency that represents me had lain eyes on the manuscript. It was just me and a junior agent/editor from the agency going back and forth with feedback. Around October 2021, after about three full-draft revisions, I believed my manuscript to be finished, and the agency started pursuing publishing opportunities. I believed, at that point, that my part was done.
And then the manuscript got rejected for print by one of my dream publishers. I canât say I was too disappointed, because the feedback they sent back after rejecting it made so much sense, much of it impossible to ignore. And so I agreed to revise the manuscript and incorporate the necessary changes. But the publishersâ feedback made me wonder what else I might have missed, leading me to do something I should have done much earlier: send the manuscript to friends and/or fellow writers to get their thoughts as well.
One of the fellow writers to whom I sent the draftâmy love, Fui Can-Tamakloe (watch out for this name, because heâs a legend in the making) managed to go through the entire thing and gave me some of the most constructive feedback I have ever received on a story. Combined with the publishersâ feedback, I realized I had much more to revise than I initially thought. And yet, I continued to underestimate how much work it would take.
I did not apply to the LOATAD residency to work on Project Y. At the time I applied, I had considered Project Y to be finished. I intended to spend the residency working on a novel project which we may call Project X. But soon before the residency began, my agent closed an audiobook deal for Project Y (here, we shall pause for celebration, because I do not celebrate my milestones enough! đ), which made the need to finish the necessary revisions much more urgent.
Thus, I set off to the residency with a mission: to quickly finish up Project Y in the first few days, and then use the rest of the month-long stay for Project X, like Iâd initially intended.
Spoiler alert: I barely touched Project X at all.
During the Residency
In my mind, Project Y was a close-to-final manuscript which simply needed a few tweaks here and there. But the month of March taught me a hard lesson, my dears: never underestimate the butt-kicking power of the revision process! I thought the entire Project Y revision process would take mere days, but by the end of the first week, I had barely reworked the first quarter of the manuscript.
A mandatory part of the residency program was weekly critique sessions between us writers, facilitated by some LOATAD personnel. In each session, I submitted a partial or full draft of Project Y, and each time, I received some feedback that made so much sense that I literally could not ignore it if I wanted my manuscript to get as good as it could. (This was in addition to the feedback I already had from the reject publishers and Fui.)
A revision note from a peer may sound simple and concise, for example, âThis plot point was an unexpected shift which didnât connect very well with the rest of the story.â But then you re-read your story, and you think about it, and you realize that unless you want this gaping hole in your plot that you somehow never saw before, you will have to either deeply revise the last third of your manuscript, or go back to the beginning and start dropping the appropriate foreshadowingâand either option is going to take a while.
On top of all my peersâ feedback, there was my own. The more I worked on Project Y, the more I found dozens of ways to improve this story that Iâd once misguidedly considered finished.
During my âfinishingâ process at LOATAD, I did more than just revise. I found myself shuffling scenes and plot points around the entire manuscript, rewriting certain scenes from beginning to end, and even composing entirely new scenes. Project Y ended up consuming me for nearly the entire duration of the residency, which is to say that no eyes but mine ever saw a single word of Project X.
In the beginning, the unexpectedly long revision process made me very anxious. I worked and worked and still, the work was not finishing. I felt pressure mounting upon me to deliver a final draft to my agency so they could turn it over to the audiobook publishers. Eventually, though, the Holy Spirit helped me make peace with my pace and accept, among other things, that everything was going exactly as it was always meant to go.
I do not regret how I spent my time at the residency. I learnt so much about my unconscious writing habits, the crutches I tend to fall back on, and the process of âfinishingâ a manuscript. Working on this novella was great practice, since there are many novels in my head pending realization. Now I have a better idea of what to expect once those get to their final stages.
Altogether, this was my key takeaway: When you care about professional-grade work, the thing you think is a finishing process may end up being yet another, intensive revision and even re-writing process.
Other important lessons this Project Y taught me:
1.    For every 4 people to whom I send a manuscript for review, perhaps 2 will read it to the end, and maybe only 1 will provide thorough feedback on the entire project. No shade to those who canât deliver, but I am especially grateful to those who do.
2.    I must not consider myself finished until I have feedback from various writers/readers whose different backgrounds and skill sets mean they can pick up on different things, both technical and creative. More importantly, I must pay the most attention to the points where they all seem to be saying the same/similar things.
3.    Two very necessary qualities for handling the revision process are patience for myself, and the ability to compartmentalize external pressure. The road ahead is long, but Iâm working actively on both.
Extras
I was the featured guest on a recently released episode of the Change Africa Podcast, so check it out if you want to listen to me talk about miscellaneous writing-related stuff, including how it felt to be shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Morland Writing Fellowship.
In this issue, I mentioned Fui Can-Tamakloe, who happens to have an audio drama project called Goodbye, Gold Coast, so, you know. Watch that space. (And if you want to check out my own audio drama project, Green Green Grasses, in which Fui plays a character in Episode 2 (âHow the Bull Got Curved Hornsâ), I wouldnât be mad at all. đ)
Until next time,
The Spider Kid. đ¸ď¸