Writing can be a lot of fun sometimes. There are no rules as to what you can put down on a page, literally anything can happen. It’s just you, the laptop, the blank screen, and twenty six letters, prepared to test the limits of your imagination.
…then comes revision.
Revision is that little responsible corner in the back of your mind that’s shaking its head as you create nonsense and have a blast… and then forces you to look back and consider how much of this exciting journey is actually going to be exciting to read instead of write. I’m very used to writing for myself, just having fun on a first draft and moving on. The process of going back and figuring out how to improve to make the reading part of the experience more effective and enjoyable is relatively new to me. Sometimes, a proper revision can be to change only a couple of words, or the order of paragraphs or many an image. The smallest changed can have a big impact on the overall result. Other times, however, and as was necessary with my Literacy Narrative, it becomes difficult to find a good starting point, or one magical little place to cut out, and it becomes necessary to press delete and start over.
The idea still lingers in your mind, but the words can be stubborn at times, and rewriting can be the best way to go. Some passages can be salvaged, but often times coming at a project with a fresh perspective can bring vastly different results.
A revision in no way implies that the new product will be overwhelmingly superior to the original, though of course that is the intention and the hope, but with time, effort, and most of all patience, it can all come together, and improve bit by bit.
The Literacy Narrative vastly transformed between its initial creation, its adaptation to comic form, and the revision of the original. I suspect if I went back and made a new comic with the new version in mind, it too would come out as something new entirely. I’d like to think that it’s evolved with each revision, and that going back and looking at the process can give me a roadmap on how to improve my writing in the future.
The Secret Language of Sabrina 