Rewriting at 30,000 Feet (Revision Pt 3)

When working on rewriting a book-length project, I frequently found the advice to disconnect the idea of revision from the idea of editing. In other words, when we talk rewriting and revising, we aren’t talking about line-level work. In fact, one of the best ways to guarantee your time spent in revision is productive is to begin at the macro level and work towards the micro.

Don’t start with scenes or chapters, and certainly not paragraphs or lines. Start with the book as a whole.

Many times, as writers, we bake problems into our drafts from the get-go. I think this is particularly true of people who, like me, tend not to write from outlines, who identify as pantsers rather than plotters, gardeners rather than carpenters.

The problem with less formally rigorous approaches to constructing our drafts is that we can end up with significant structural problems. Plots may become more wandery than intended; subplots can temporarily overtake centerstage when they shouldn’t.

Enter the reverse outline.

I first learned about reverse outlines when working at the Writing Center at George Mason University during my MFA. The process is exactly what it sounds like—you take a ‘finished’ piece of writing and generate an outline from it. This is a particularly useful tool for understanding the organization and progression of main points in an academic paper, but it has its place in fiction, too—something I first learned from reading Matt Bell’s Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts.

Bell says, “It’s at this stage—and never before this stage—that I write a full outline of the novel, outlining what already exists (emphasis his)…In this document, the goal is to try to capture the main story of the novel, by which I mean the action of the book’s prime timeline. What you want…are the book’s events.”

I hate outlines, as we’ve already discussed, but revising was new to me, and I asked around for advice. My friend Timothy Johnson, who hadn’t read Bell, echoed his advice—outline. Figure out what you’re dealing with. This is the way.

Both Matt and Tim recommended utilizing a narrative outline—in other words, something that reads like a very long, detailed summary of the novel itself. Bell says that this makes the work feel more like writing, and I found this to be true. I also found the task to be significantly more challenging than I imagined it might be. Perhaps for a book told straight through in linear fashion with a single POV character, it might have been simpler; I, instead, had to navigate rotating narrators and a sometimes-disjointed timeline. To make this easier, I focused on the idea that we should write our summary with an eye only for plot. Details and events that move the story forward—the action of the unfolding story. Not characterization, sometimes given through scene or backstory; not interiority. Simply progressing action.

One of the things that very quickly becomes apparent while working on this part of the project in this way is whether or not you have a tight chain of causality in the story. In other words, events should unfold like dominoes, with one action or choice leading to the next, leading to the next. Anywhere that chain breaks down—where chance moves us forward rather than our characters and their actions—can be a place where there’s a plot problem and a disruption of the novel’s tension. Studying this chain of events can also help us understand the pace of the novel, or the speed with which these significant, plot-moving events take place. You get to set the pace, as an author, and there are no right or wrong answers—but you should know and choose intentionally how this functions.

Bell points out that even if you wrote your draft from an outline, you’ve likely diverged from it over the course of writing, so this is still a useful exercise. Why?

Here is the magic of creating a master document that summarizes your book. Macro-level problems are much easier to see at this level, certainly, and that clarity is beneficial. But what is perhaps more beneficial is that you can begin your revision at the macro scale itself.

When it comes to reorganizing, replotting, tightening tension, fixing the chain of causality in our novel, working inside a hundreds-of-pages-long document is more than daunting. It’s technologically clunky, emotionally overwhelming, and quickly becomes unwieldy.

Instead, you can simply edit the summary. Pretend, for a moment, that this new piece of writing—this narrative outline—is all that exists. Look at it as its own story. How can you fix it and make it better? Without worrying about the destruction such work might wreak on your draft, you can rewrite entire sections of plot, reorder scenes, combine or eliminate or create new characters, introduce new subplots. At 30,000 feet, this work is easy. A few key words, a new sentence here, a different transition there, and your story begins to take shape anew.

In my next post, I’ll cover some specific areas of work to accomplish at this point, at the macro-level, but before I get to that, I want to tell you something that I learned from writing a narrative outline after my draft. I learned, first, that I’d written a good book. It was not ready, and it was not its best self, but it was good—it had good bones, so to speak. I liked it, still. I felt its excitement building. Second, I learned that I should maybe consider outlining, at least in very broad narrative strokes, my next book.

Why?

Many of my problems with length came from a lack of narrative focus. As a gardener—a pantser—I’d done a lot of writing around my story to find the main beats of my story. I knew almost as soon as I got into writing the summary that there were things that didn’t make sense, anymore. They’d need to shift or be eliminated. And for the first time, rather than feeling scared about losing so much material, I was excited about doing the cutting, because I could see the leaner, meaner, stronger story underneath the fluff.

This was a revelation to me, one that no one really predicted in encouraging me to take this route. I didn’t realize I’d see so much work left to do and become totally re-energized for it.

This is the power of seeing your story at 30,000 feet, I think. From that high up, your story and all other stories look so similar. You don’t see typos or errors or clunky phrasing; you don’t even see shoddy scene work. You see a story. A story that moves characters and readers through a series of events towards a conclusion. It is easier to see and to isolate and to strengthen the spine of what you are writing, and to fall in love with it again. It's kind of like the difference between playing Sim City and playing the Sims. You don't need to work on the perfect home design; you need to think about streets and cities, about the larger world of the story. Don't pick out new wallpaper or fish tanks, but think about planning the city of your book in such a way that the traffic runs smoothly. From so high up, everything is beautiful!

When you eventually begin rewriting, this gorgeous, perfected, slowly and thoughtfully produced narrative summary, perfected to the best of your ability, contains all the best of what you’ve already written and all the best you hope for your book. And you use it, line by line, as a blueprint. You reconstruct your book from a plan that is already a picture of your book. It’s a magical, exhilarating experience, even for someone who resolutely hates plans! Because this one, this book you’re holding in summarized form, it is your book and it is totally within your power to make it as good as you’ve envisioned it can be.

Next up, we’ll talk macro revising. We’ll discuss structure (especially finding beginnings and endings, tightening saggy middles), plot and that chain of causality, combining and eliminating and introducing new characters, and unique structural challenges that you may encounter along the way.

-          Inter-relatedness, chain of causality

-          Tightening up sagging middles

-          Finding the beginning and end

-          Combining characters

-          Unique structural challenges

And, when you’re ready, we’ll talk about how this both primes you for and proves the merits of a total, ground-up rewrite, starting with a terrifying, new blank page.

Where to Begin: Gaining Perspective, Setting Goals, and Finding the Heart (Revision Pt. 2)

Aside from the fact that writers would much rather write than rewrite (caused in part by the previously-discussed logical fallacies that the first draft (A) is already the best version of the book you can write and (B) that your first draft might not actually need revising)—I think one of the biggest challenges in any creative endeavor is getting started. Many artists have described the terror of the empty page or the blank canvas; worse, I think, is staring at the half-done project, unsure of how to get it across the finish line.

It's a common adage that you should “get some distance” from a draft. You might be told to “put it in a drawer” or “forget about it for a while” so that you can return to your manuscript with fresh eyes. All of this is about giving yourself the invaluable opportunity to see it again, and to hopefully see it for its promise as well as its flaws.

But how exactly do you create distance?

Time is the most important factor. You need enough time to forget some of the work that went into your draft—time to be surprised by your own turns of phrase or the specific way a plot point unfolds. You need time to watch and read and experience things that aren’t your novel—time to recognize that this version of what you created, while awesome, is only a first step. You also need time to get excited about getting back into the work.

I struggled with this “forget it” advice as a writer. Perhaps it’s the way my brain works, but it would take a lot longer than I’m willing to wait in order to actually forget the draft. So, instead, I focused on a different metric for gaining perspective: I waited until I was sure that I was ready to say goodbye to the draft I’d already written and start on a new one, though that was a pretty daunting prospect. Perhaps you’re the kind of writer who can really forget their work—but I found my strategy, which was less about forgetting and more about gaining a new perspective and a new appreciation for what my draft was and wasn’t, to be a good alternative.

The truth is, when I returned to my current novel after only a few weeks of setting it aside, I already had some ideas about what I wanted to improve. I’d been working on the draft for more than three years—part of it reworked and reworked as part of an MFA thesis, parts of it less fully formed. But I knew that it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I envisioned the kind of tightly woven, exciting, gutting story that I liked to read—and if I was honest with myself, my book wasn’t there yet.

And this, I think, is a good place to start: goals.

Setting goals can be an elusive thing for a writer, but most of them look like: Write 2,000 words by Friday. Write five days a week. Finish the chapter. Finish the novel. They may have dates assigned to them, or they may not. As the primary caregiver for two kids, deadlines are as slippery as fish in my world—slippery enough I usually avoid them entirely.

But goals for revision?

In addition to feeling like I wanted my book to be vaguely better, I knew only one specific thing. My novel was WAY too long.

WAY WAY WAY too long.

If I had any hopes of anyone ever wanting to read it, I’d need to cut the length by at least 25%, preferably more.

This was my first goal: Cut the length to something approximating saleable.

(Don’t worry, I’ll give you the ugly specifics of this battle in a later post, even though it is humiliating to do it. I credit Matt Bell with the courage—he told us how many instances of “that” he cut from his draft. I’ll follow suit by giving you some horrifying editing details from my current journey.)

As I sat with the idea of revising, there were a few other things I knew needed to be changed—certain chapters that weren’t working the way I wanted them to, certain plot elements that felt shaky at best.

I think this is as good a place to start as any. Start making a list of things you want to accomplish in your revision. Leave room on your list, because in our next step, we’ll be generating even more of a punch list—but start now with what you know you want to change. My early revision list on my current project looked something like this:

·         Cut a bajillion words

·         Fix (Character X)’s voice

·         Rework chapters 10-14 (pacing, interiority, etc.)

·         Figure out a way to enhance (X) element of worldbuilding because it’s unclear

This felt like enough of a list to get started, so I cracked open the document at the beginning, and set about the first real step of getting to know what I’d created: reading it.

This is an important and, I think, often-overlooked part of revision. It’s so tempting to start fixing right away, but the trouble is that if you’re anything like most writers, your novel has been put together over long stretches of time. It’s important to see what exactly it is that you’ve created without making changes.

This is where the work begins—and where you’ll start (but not finish) adding to your revision punch list.

As you read, make notes to yourself. Highlight the good and bad. Write down all the new ideas and realizations you have. Resist the urge to start tinkering. It isn’t useful yet, and it can send you into spirals of doing work that you’re only going to redo again later. Just read and remark.

While you’re reading, you should pay particular attention to the heart of your story. What is giving it life? Is it one particular plotline? Is there a theme that keeps coming up that you didn’t even notice when you were drafting? Is that something you want to feed and lean into or something you want to prune back? Are there characters that just make you fall in love with them? What is the pulse of the story? What gives it a life of its own? What elements live in your imagination when you walk away? Which parts make you excited to read your own work? Are you surprised that the heart of the story seems different from what you planned? Has the focal point shifted? Is it better for those changes?

Find the heart. Fall in love with it.

And at the same time, notice what’s hiding that heart…in a bad way. Are there too many characters muddying up the story? Are there distracting subplots or threats and ideas that don’t go anywhere? Are there places where tension flags and you get bored with your own story? Is there something in the way of falling into the world of the story?

These are the most useful observations you can make at this juncture. Try not to let the negative observations color your view of the book—and try not to let the positive ones cloud your judgement. Right now, you’re looking at the immature version of your novel. It has all the potential baked in—but it hasn’t fully achieved what it’s capable of yet.

So, my “Where to Begin” step of revision actually has three steps baked in:

1)      Try to gain perspective and distance from your draft and make room to see it with fresh eyes.

2)      Start a list of goals—but don’t start working towards them. Your list is, itself, a first draft of a revision plan.

3)      Read your book and try very hard not to start tinkering. Instead, find the heart of what you’ve created, the good and the bad. Fall in love with the potential of your novel, and see if you can imagine all its best parts and features blossoming as its faults recede. When you think you’ve got a feel for what it actually is you’ve created, it’s time to move into a more active phase of revision.

In our next post, we’ll be talking about the phase of revision that had the most profound impact on my novel—the thing that really allowed me to turn what I’d worked on into the book I really wanted it to be. We’ll talk about working in summary as a method of planning large-scale, functional revision, using it as a strategy to tighten and structurally re-engineer your book.

You Can See That Again! (AKA, An Intro to a Series on Revision)

One time, when I was a kid—middle school aged, maybe—I took a writing standardized test, and failed.

The teacher got in touch with my Mom to talk about it, because they were both initially perplexed by this. Writing has been my “thing” ever since I could do it (and even kind of before I could do it, as the stories my Dad carefully transcribed and typed out for me when I was three or four indicate…), and I’ve always been a strong test taker.

“She didn’t prewrite,” the teacher said.

“I didn’t need to,” I replied, with all the ego of a preteen wordsmith. And I was, in that instance, not wrong. Unfortunately.

The truth is, I’ve never been much for outlining, planning, or preparing. Sometimes I’ll jot down some bullet points so that I don’t lose track of them, but mostly, I’m a gardener. I cultivate ideas and tensions and relationships and watch them grow. I’m a pantser in the worst way—oh, hey, look at that turn of phrase I just made, I’ll say to myself. That’s not at all what I thought this character was about, but cool, let’s say that’s real. How does that play out?

And all along, this has worked out pretty well for me. I never really got called out for my lack of planning, not even during three years of an MFA. And because an MFA is focused on workshopping “clean” drafts, and only occasionally even “revising” them, I never got called out for the other work I didn’t do, either—the back-end part of writing. The postwriting.

Yes, if you haven’t guessed yet (and how could you?), this is a blog post that will kick off a series of indeterminate length about revision.

As I taught my creative writing students, to revise means, literally, to see again.

It isn’t about fixing comma splices and repeated words and spelling errors. Revising is about taking the manuscript you’ve written and seeing it with fresh eyes and new perspective and turning it into art.

Just like I was a pretty terrible outliner (and am learning, still, the price of this negligence), I was a pitiful reviser. I’d read and reread my work, shifting a few things around. Occasionally I’d do some cutting or moving around, but that was about as violent as my editorial work ever got.

And then I wrote this book, and I knew it had problems I didn't want to acknowledge, and I knew I could try to fix them, but I didn’t know how. It's a thing that seems to have been omitted, practically speaking, from ever being taught. Somehow we're supposed to just figure it out on our own.

And here’s the thing, friends. It was really, really tempting to say that this version of things was the best I could do. That it was as clean and solid and well-constructed as I could make it. After all, hadn’t I already done my best work, all along? For weeks, months, years? Hadn’t I already put down the best words I could find to tell this story?

I had! How could it possibly get any better when I'd already given it everything I had?

And that inner monologue became a striking craft lesson for me.

Writers don’t fail to revise because they think they’re all that and a bag of chips. Writers fail to revise because they’re worried they can’t get any better.

It’s not a conscious fear. It’s not like we sit around staring at the words we’ve written going, “Well, that’s total garbage.” At least, not 100% of the time. We like to say we believe in the potential for growth and improvement, but I think deep down, we each harbor a concern that this is as good as it gets.

Take, for instance, the common advice that you should literally, totally, from a blank page rewrite your book (This is advice we’ll talk about in this series, I promise). I think the real reason people don’t do this isn’t because they think it’s too much work. I think the reason they don’t do it is because they honestly believe that the version they’ve put down is the best they’ll ever do.

Why do I think that?

Because I thought that, myself. And sometimes, I’m still tempted to think that. And statistics would generally say it's unlikely I'm the only one.

I am ashamed to say that I was in my thirties and had already been teaching University Creative Writing, begging my students to revise their work, when I finally figured out that my work, too, needed revision.

I am not, after all, an exception to this rule I was teaching.

The realization wasn’t the slow seeping kind that I’ve had about other bad habits (like, oh, my failure to prewrite!). The realization hit like lightning. I wrestled with my plot and my book and my characters and suddenly, one day, saw new paths through the work I’d done that were fresh and exciting and tight and practically shimmering on the page with their potential.

And you know what? I didn’t feel bad that I hadn’t seen those things before.

I felt completely ecstatic that there was some way to make this behemoth better. To make the book everything I'd hoped it could be. I hadn't admitted to myself that I was worried I just couldn’t do it.

The simple reality is that I needed to revise it. To see it again. To put fresh eyes on it and bring all that I’d learned over the course of writing it to bear on its pages. I was a different writer looking at the manuscript from the finish line than I was in the midst of the journey, and that writer? Shockingly, she knew how to do things that the other version of myself didn't.

It is thrilling when you start to rewrite and revise and the story works like magic. It’s like someone erasing friction. Like being able to run without your knees aching. Like how easy it is to breathe when you finally get some decent decongestants.

You feel like a superhuman version of the writer you are, because you’re operating on an entirely different continuum than you were before.

This is my exhortation to you at the gates of my probably-needs-revision blog series on revision:

Give yourself the benefit of superpowers. Believe that your next version of your book Is going to be better than the current version of your book. Amaze yourself with how good you actually are!

Revise.

Re-see.

If you’re willing to try it, to be aggressive with your work in a way you haven’t been before, I can literally guarantee you—I’d put money on it if I had any!—that your work will get better in ways you couldn’t predict.

And no, I’m not leaving it there. We’re gonna walk through some of the revision tactics I’ve found most useful over the past year.Post script: I got to retake the test, by the way, because I was lucky enough to have parents and a teacher who really believed in me and who made things happen I couldn’t have on my own. And you know what I did? I wrote that essay without prewriting—then I wrote an outline of what my essay turned out to be. So…relevant details: A) I didn’t know reverse outlining was a thing.

B) Seriously, the ego. LOL. Who even was I.

C) I missed that early chance to stretch myself and see if outlining might actually make me a better writer. (Spoiler: quite probably. Note to self: DON’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE.)

D) Standardized tests are completely ridiculous.