One of the most difficult things about revisions is dealing with what isn’t there. Finding the details that need to be changed if you’ve taken something out is often harder than changing things that result from putting something in.

Here’s an example. In my current work, Spark, a steampunk novel, one of my characters is being held captive by some island natives. In the original scene, the local shaman comes in holding a large basket. He sets it down to listen to some dialogue back and forth, then settles in to do a ritual in the cell, involving fire and knives. Then he picks up the basket and walks out again.

Well, I decided this ritual was both too important and too space-consuming to be done INSIDE the cell where our hero is being held. So I moved it outside. The part of the scene that remained in the cell was the conversation. So here’s how it ended up: shaman walks in, conversation, shaman walks out, THEN ritual. That makes sense, right?

But it took me three read-throughs to realize that my shaman put down the basket for the conversation, then picked it up again, for no apparent reason. This is not a heavy basket. Nor does anybody need both hands for the conversation – it’s just not that intimate. So my shaman, a muscled, tattooed fellow with glowy blue ink inscribed in his skin, sets down a perfectly ordinary basket like a jerk, only to pick it up again once the talking is done.

Sure, it’s a basket. That’s not a big deal, but it could have been a knife, in which case our hero would have had every opportunity to grab it and make a try for escape. If he didn’t do so, then my hero looks like the jerk. Could be big!

So whenever you take something out, or move something around, it can be difficult to find all the little details that were changed by the change. Today’s lesson – revisions are hard!