"After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months"
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Revision, in Haddix's telling, isn't a glamorous victory lap; it's the real job, and it's supervised. The line has the casual, slightly exasperated cadence of someone puncturing the myth that books arrive as lightning bolts. By foregrounding the agent and editor, she quietly re-centers authorship as a negotiated, professional process: the draft leaves your hands, comes back marked up, and your ego has to learn to share space with the market, the reader, and the craft.
The specificity is what makes it persuasive. "Revised draft" implies you've already done the private work; "more improvements" signals that the finish line keeps moving, not because you're failing, but because good writing is iterative by design. Her small typo ("improvement sand") even unintentionally reinforces the point: text is always in flux, always one cleanup away from clarity. That's the subtext of revising, too: you don't just fix plot holes, you sand down burrs, remove noise, tighten the signal.
The wide time range - "a few hours to a few months" - is the cultural reality check. It normalizes both the quick surgical pass and the long, grinding rethink, validating writers who fear they're doing it wrong if it takes too long or not long enough. Coming from a working novelist, the intent feels less like advice-from-on-high and more like permission: revision isn't proof you lacked talent; it's proof you're taking the work seriously enough to make it legible to someone else.
The specificity is what makes it persuasive. "Revised draft" implies you've already done the private work; "more improvements" signals that the finish line keeps moving, not because you're failing, but because good writing is iterative by design. Her small typo ("improvement sand") even unintentionally reinforces the point: text is always in flux, always one cleanup away from clarity. That's the subtext of revising, too: you don't just fix plot holes, you sand down burrs, remove noise, tighten the signal.
The wide time range - "a few hours to a few months" - is the cultural reality check. It normalizes both the quick surgical pass and the long, grinding rethink, validating writers who fear they're doing it wrong if it takes too long or not long enough. Coming from a working novelist, the intent feels less like advice-from-on-high and more like permission: revision isn't proof you lacked talent; it's proof you're taking the work seriously enough to make it legible to someone else.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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