When I wrote the Grand, I made sure to collect statistics on changes and kept a copy of revisions. This enabled me to measure my progress and gauge how things were moving along. I detailed this process before under the post titled Spiral Development for the Literary World.
There was one element I never explored at the time and that was comparing the earliest revision available against the newest. In the back of my mind, I half-expected it show me a document filled with corrections and would find very little original text remaining. What I found was pretty much exactly as I imagined.
To find the ideal candidate, I looked through the amount of changes made per revision and originally found that the Van Helsing Paradox had the highest number. Not a revelation per sey, considering it is also my largest chapter.
Instead, I compared total revisions made against the amount of words and discovered that the Man and the Sea had highest percentage of corrections over it’s lifetime. Since this chapter is also one of the shortest, it also allowed me to show visually how the bulk of the chapter was altered.
For those curious here is a list of the number of changes based on revision:
- Revision 2 – 62
- Revision 3 – 30
- Revision 4 – 17
- Revision 5 – 12
- Revision 6 – 4
- Revision 7 – 3
- Revision 8 – 2
- Revision 9 – 1
- Revision 10 – 3
- Revision 11 – 2
- Revision 12 – 1
- Revision 13 – 1
- Revision 14 – 1
Overall I found it humbling and fascinating. It allowed me to see how dramatic 12 revisions could be when compared directly!
