REVISION

"The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant." Will Shetterly

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

"I have rewritten- often several times- every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers." Vladimir Nabokov

"The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug." Mark Twain

“All first drafts are shit.” Ernest Hemingway

“A careful first draft is a failed first draft.” Patricia Hampl

“The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.” Voltaire


TIPS FOR RE-VISIONING

• THINK BIG, don't tinker – don’t get caught up in the small details, save them for later. Instead, think about big picture questions – structure, character, exactitude, language.

• Read your work aloud, or read it to a group – often by just reading your work out loud, you will notice lines that are confusing, difficult to read, or that just don’t flow right. This is even more true if you’re reading to a group!

• Patrol for adverbs and adjectives – go for stronger nouns and verbs instead. If you are falling back on lots of adjectives and adverbs, chances are you could strengthen your work by looking for more powerful, interesting, and exact nouns and verbs.

• Put it away for a while – it’s difficult to look at your work objectively too soon after you write it. Try putting work away for anywhere from a week to 6 months and then looking at it with fresh eyes.

• Move scene into summary and vice versa – often a labored scene of dialogue can be summarized in one pithy sentence of summary. Similarly, a dull paragraph of summary might come alive if it were written in scene.

• Find the hot spots and write into them – don’t worry about how the material will fit into your work, just write into the electric moments and see what arises.

• Experiment with the narrator/speaker – try moving from 3rd to 1st person to give the story more immediacy and to find the voice.

• Envision a specific person as your audience and write to that person

• Re-write a poem in a traditional form, or take a formal poem and re-write it as free verse – sometimes we get trapped by the form our work takes, especially if it feels very successful at the beginning. Sometimes the constraint of a form helps us think about content, and sometimes breaking out of a form helps move the poem forward.

• Change the form – from prose to poetry, theater to fiction, etc.

• Play with line breaks – go from long and skinny to short and squat, or change the stanza breaks to create different emphasis.

• Take an interesting minor character and let that character become the main character in a new story

• Make a mess – resist the urge to polish too soon (i.e. in the first and second drafts). It is difficult to write well when you are worried about perfection. For many writers early drafts are no more than a sketch of what the final product will be.

• Think about how much you tell your reader – are you providing too much, is the piece too on-the-nose or over-determined? Do all the arrows point in the same direction? Or are you providing too little – are events rising out of the blue, or is the narration confusing and chaotic?

• Have your characters say the opposite of what they mean – this is a good exercise when you think the story might be too “on-the-nose”

• Cut away everything that explains the story or poem, leaving only action and description

• Translate a poem or story into a different language – how does the work change?

• Your revisions don’t have to make it into the final draft!