Revisions: raising your story on multiple levels

So you've written a first draft. You've sent it off to your critique partners, and you're getting comments back. You thought it worked pretty well first time around but people are saying maybe it would be better if you did this, if you did that...

I am in this position right now.

The good news is, the things I thought were good... were pretty good. On the other hand, the fact that there are things I can still do to improve the story is, to my mind, the better news. Revisions give me an opportunity to see things I hadn't seen before, and make the story that much better.

Writing a first draft is an exploration, as much as it is the telling of a story. You may do it deliberately, with an outline (I certainly do), but still you explore the world and the characters as you write, and new things develop as you watch how the whole thing plays out. You're also exploring the story itself - which parts of it resonate, what themes it has, what its focus is, and which aspects of it are most important.

Critique suggestions come in different types. Some are easy to implement, while others are more difficult. Any story works on multiple levels, and revision can be needed on any one or several (all) of these levels. I find text-level revisions (improvement to prose, flow, etc.) easiest to implement. "This sounded awkward, so please rephrase..." Next easiest are plot-level revisions. "I saw that one coming, so if you want him to accomplish X, you'll have to have him do it another way." The hardest ones are the ones that relate to questions of focus. "You put so much attention on A that you seemed to be taking it away from B, and B was what I really cared about."

I have a tendency to plan fixes at the same time that I'm reading my critiques, and to want to jump into my revisions as quickly as I can, but I have to make sure that I'm addressing the focus and thematic questions first. Those are the ones which, though they are most difficult to address, create the largest change in what happens overall. A change in focus can also lead to changes in plot, in text, even in character.

It's like trying to fit large stones, pebbles and sand into a bucket. If I put the large stones in first, I may have to discard some of my pebbles and sand, but if I don't put them in first, they'll never fit at all.

I'll be thinking about this as I head into my revisions of "The Liars."

Revisions: your story isn't you

I've heard many authors talk about how the characters in their stories seem to do things of their own volition, or about how the story seems to be outside of them rather than something they have created. It's easy to get this sensation when you're in the midst of creating - somewhat harder, I think, to retain it when you go back and start revisions.

In some ways, that sense of the story existing on its own can make us balk at revising. It's outside of us now, it has its own internal form and structure; the characters are who they are, and do what they do. In other ways, it's the sense that the story represents us as authors - that in a way, it is us - that causes us to hesitate.

I think considering the story as existing outside of us is perfectly fine. It may resist revision in some ways, but as long as we can consider the characters, the form and the structure from the outside, revision is possible. It's when we feel that we are the story that the revisions process can really defeat us. Then critique and requests for edits can feel like insults, and restructuring like an assault.

It's not that what we create isn't great. It isn't even that it's not publishable. I've seen whole books and famous movies that made me think, "needed one more rewrite." But though those books have been published and those movies produced, I always think it's a shame that that final revision never happened.

I've tried to train myself to take a particular view of my own work. To me, the story isn't me, and it isn't even what I've written. The story exists somewhere else - a plane of ideas, or some kind of Platonic dimension - where it exists in an ideal state. What I'm trying to do by writing it is capture that perfect spirit, that resonance, and convey it to my readers. Thus, revisions are the means by which I bring the story closer to the ideal. Maybe this is why I enjoy it so much!

Critique shows me how my readers understand what I'm doing; it gives me a sense of the pictures they see, and the resonance and intensity they feel. They aren't seeing the ideal form of the story any more than I am, but we're all trying, looking at it from different angles, and in that process we jointly get insight into what the story could be. Then once I feel I've glimpsed the way to get closer to what I want, I set about making it happen. Sometimes when I realize what the story really requires, and I feel a resonance come into place, it gives me goose bumps.

I'm not saying everyone has to think this way. What I'm trying to do is explain why I find revisions exciting instead of daunting. If what I'm sharing here helps any writer out there to take on the process of revisions with more relish and less sense of personal injury, then I'll be happy.

Something to look forward to

As I was going through my files last week I ran across an old version of a story I wrote some years ago, called "The Valiant Heart." This is a story that I posted on a now-long-defunct version of my website - a story I'd always liked but never been able to sell.

Lo and behold, when I started looking at the text, I started wanting to rewrite it and make it better. I told this to a writer friend of mine, and she suggested that I keep the old version and do a comparison of the old and new versions, talking about what I'd changed and why.

I was immediately excited about the idea. Therefore, my current plan is to sneak some revisions for this story in between my other projects, and eventually (when the revision is done) post it up at my author website alongside "Let the Word Take Me," at the same time bringing out a discussion post here talking about revisions and what I've learned as a writer since the last time I tried to write "The Valiant Heart."

This should be fun! I'll keep you posted on my progress.

When do you walk away? And how do you know when to come back?

These writing projects of ours take a lot of time and effort. Some folks I know can pound out short stories (and more power to them!), but I know I'm not like this, and certainly novels demand more. Even those who write NaNoWriMo novels often spend a lot of planning time in advance of the writing period, and then more time revising and cleaning up afterward.

So let's say you've invested a large amount of worldbuilding time, design time, and writing time into a project, but no matter what you do, it refuses to do precisely what you want. It might be that you've dived into something but it has petered out in the middle. That was what happened to me with For Love, For Power after I'd written around nineteen chapters. It might be that you've rewritten something over and over but every time you fix one thing, beta readers keep finding something else that bothers them. That one happened to me with a work in progress called The Past Unhealed, and the things they kept finding weren't tiny fix-its, but major rethink-this-whole-section stuff. It might be that you've got whole books which are sequels to other books that aren't quite working (yep, I have those too). Or maybe your work in progress is just acting ornery and doesn't feel right.

Walk away.

Don't just leave it alone for a weekend. That's fine, and it helps, but by this time you've probably already tried that. What I mean is, go and write something else.

Yes, it can feel like failure. Holy cow, I put years of work into this! How can I abandon it? But I'm not suggesting you take all your precious hard-won files and toss them in the trash can (either literally or figuratively). I'm suggesting that you refresh your brain by giving it a different problem to work on. A challenge - particularly if it's something you haven't done before.

When I walked away from my first four novels, I started writing short stories at first. That felt different. A good number of those were in the same world as the novels, and were up against some big hurdles because of that, but it was good to give them a try. Why? Because I'd never forced my brain to think short. I'd never tried to create a story small enough to balance in the palm of my hand. Slowly I started learning that when the story was small, I could visualize all its pieces in my head at once, and I started understanding how the parts of the story related to one another. Writing the short stories took on a new fire for me, and my rejections started getting better.

Then I picked up a new novel. Totally new - not in the same world, with none of the same characters. I applied what I'd learned from short stories to this novel. Lo and behold it was working. I wrote the whole thing in (for me) record time. Revising it was still brutal, and I had a few very embarrassing failures with agents before I had it in the right place, but when it came out finished, it made me happy. And my agent liked it too!

Because it was a novel that used none of the same parameters, I exercised my brain on it in a different way. I did different things trying to revise it, and set my brain against different kinds of problems. For a writer, trying new things is really important. We have to try things that are challenging, because they help our minds and skills to grow.

For me, more than four years went by before I went back to my previous material.

I wouldn't have had to, necessarily. There are a lot of people out there with "trunk novels" that never see the light of day. I could have left mine in the dark, but there were some factors that drew me back to them.

1. The world wouldn't leave me alone. I'd be going along, and learn something about language or culture or writing, and a new connection would form in my head. Wow, I'd say to myself, that could really apply to Varin in an interesting way.

2. The story shifted whenever I started thinking about it again. My new ideas of structure gave me new ideas for how to approach it, and I started seeing things here and there that would change for the better.

3. The characters grew without me writing them. They kept coming back to me and whispering things in my head - but even more than that, I started seeing things about how they interacted on a larger level. And when I spoke about them with friends, I figured out even more. The fact that Tagret had to be the protagonist in For Love, For Power (shoot, why didn't I realize that before?). The fact that sweet little Xinta can't be sweet little Xinta any more, but has to start out as the antagonist in the first novel where he appears (and I mean scary). The fact that one character whose head I've never visited has something terribly important to say that will add to the structure of the entire novel when I get back to it.

When I get back to it. Not if, though it was if for a very long time.

How do you decide to go back? I can't speak for others, obviously, but the thing that convinced me was when I decided experimentally to go back and think through the stories, reorganize my thoughts and outlines - and I discovered how much better everything would be. By writing for four years on other projects, I've improved my skills immensely. When I look at those old versions, I find some things that embarrass me, but other things that I think still have value. Those old words aren't a waste. They've created something in my head that has grown while I let it rest. They stand behind me now as I go back and write again. I'm not fool enough to try to revise them any more - empty files for me! - but if I need a reminder of what should happen next, or if I remember a phrase I loved, I can go back.

Here's the reward. Even before I've finished For Love, For Power, I can tell it won't die in the middle this time. I write a chapter in the beginning and I can feel everything in the story interconnecting. I can feel it's better. I handle everything more confidently and more subtly because I'm a better writer now. I can even feel ideas coming together for the books I wrote before this one, the really old books I wrote when I had no idea what I was doing yet. I'm excited now to think of those books, not embarrassed. I know I'll go back because I feel what I'll be able to do with them. The underlying structure of the world is still sound, even when I'm good enough to test it in totally different ways. It deserves a better writer to write it - and while I have no illusions of perfection, I know that I'll be good enough to draft something worth sticking with this time.

It's hard to walk away. But if you can do it, it might be the very best decision you ever made for those books you love.

Working with no text

Having successfully recovered the very latest version of four out of six-and-a-half chapters of my novel, For Love, For Power, I'm feeling good and lucky - if also frustrated because of the two and a half I have to redo. This gives me a great excuse, though, to talk about working with no text.

Working with no text is actually something I enjoy. I think that every story can benefit from it (though I don't recommend flushing the chapters in question!). For me, this takes three different forms:

1. Talking about principles. This is when I try to hone aspects of my story by walking away from it and talking about it with friends.
2. Echo listening. This is when I identify the strongest lines of my story by seeing which ones pop up in my head when I'm not looking at the text.
3. Constructing a structure scaffold. This is when I try to rethink my story on a structural level without getting bogged down in the text which is already there, as an aid to revisions.
   

I'll take these one at a time. I can't recommend number one highly enough. My friends know that I like to talk story with them (sometimes incessantly!), but the fact is that getting away from the words that create your story can help you put your mind on underlying issues more easily. You can talk about characters as though they were a real people, talk about their growth and progress and what you think they'd do or what they wouldn't do. You can also brainstorm small elements to change here and there without being limited to one single instance in the text. This is where I do most of my work on "story," that intangible thing that lies behind the words. My friends and I talk about what matters in the story - and that usually isn't a question of the words themselves.

Echo listening is a different kind of tool. I use it for the most part as a guide to editing, to show me what kind of things I should try to keep no matter what (even if, for example, they need to be moved to another location). It's also a good test for poetic meter (which I don't usually bother to count out explicitly) and what sounds good.

Building a structure scaffold is enormously useful. Some of you out there may simply sit down with a blank page and start to write, but I almost never do that. I generally have an outline - and by that I don't mean something that is numbered with Roman numerals and indents. Sometimes it's just "this has to happen here," "X goes to this place," or "Y realizes A." Especially when you have a large unwieldy chapter with lots of words that need organizing, walking away from those words can help you identify the most logical progression, which elements are core elements of the story drive, and which are peripheral. This then makes it much easier to go back to the chapter and reconstitute it without getting caught up in the flow of the existing words - to see which ones are truly necessary to core drive, and which are not.

All of these are useful for reconstructing lost text. Because of all my talks with friends, I retain a lot of the information that we've discussed about the way the story is supposed to work. I bring this to my blank page and then use echo listening and the structure scaffold that I remember to put things back together. Currently my reconstruction file is up to ten pages worth of good lines interspersed with notes on scene and structure elements that I remember coming up with. And now that I have those, I'm much less scared about regaining my lost chapters than I was when I was staring at a blank "Document 1."

I hope they can also give you ideas for dealing with text loss, or with revisions.

Why read your work aloud?

It's always a good idea to read your stories aloud. I know many people who do it. For years, I read every word I wrote to my husband (bless him!) on a nightly basis. I still read aloud to him occasionally (though kids and life make a nightly session impossible), and I've practiced for readings with him, too.

To my mind, reading aloud is an important test for any story - and it works on several levels.

The first thing that reading aloud can do is give you some distance on what you've written. Sometimes you spend so much time going over and over the words on the screen that you know them by heart, and you stop being able to see problems that might be there. Reading aloud is one way to push that text away, and put it into a context where you can be more aware of what's actually there, rather than what you think/know is there from the million times you've run your eyes over it. Printing out the story and looking at it that way can have a similar effect, but does require more paper and ink!

The second thing that reading aloud can do for you is give you a sense of the rhythmic feel of your prose. As you go through, awkward spots will give you pause, or even cause your tongue to stumble. When this happens, it's a good idea to change what you've written - because if it makes you pause or stumble, chances are your readers will have the same problem.

Those two aspects of reading aloud are helpful from the very beginning of the writing process. Once you've gotten a bit further in, you may be interested in designing character voices - and reading aloud can help you here, too.

If you've never had the experience of "reading in voices," I encourage you to try it - either with your own work or with the stories of others. You don't need to alter your voice in any extreme way; nobody needs to morph into Frank Oz to experience how this can help. Put yourself into the character's mindset as you do when writing his/her point of view, and see how your voice comes out. A strong character voice will give a distinct feel to the sound of your reading.

This can help you in two ways. First, if your writing is falling out of the voice into a more generic mode, you'll hear it. The sensation of that voice will change and you'll start sounding more like a generic narrator. Second, you should notice that your voice needs to change when you change points of view. If this doesn't happen, it's a red flag that maybe the voices aren't distinct enough. I actually surprised myself when I practiced reading The Eminence's Match aloud, and I stumbled when I first changed scenes. Suddenly I wasn't in Nekantor's voice any more, I was in Household Director Samira's - and I had to stop and think through what she should sound like when I read. That prepared me for how I might have to change my reading voice again when I hit another character point of view. Fortunately, the voice differences were already present in the manuscript (I just hadn't read it aloud in quite a while!). It was really fun to think about what to do with my reading tone in the various scenes, and the reading at BayCon turned out to be gleeful fun for me.

In any case, it's always a good idea to read your work aloud. You can learn a lot about it (and about reading it to others, a useful skill), and even help to push your work to the next level in revisions.

It's something to think about.

That awesome line you just wrote...

Sometimes, you write a line and you just love it. It has that ring that gets you right in the heart as a writer. It's either the perfect thing for that character, or awesome for that scene, or maybe it just jazzes you up because it sounds so good.

I wrote one like that a couple of days ago. I'll share it just for fun - it's from a piece I'm working on that is set in Heian-era Japan:

Foxes were passable poets, though I'd never known any of their clan to grow flowers at will.

For whatever reason, that line made me unreasonably happy. Which is why I was shocked and dismayed when I realized that the scene needed to be altered and I was about to destroy the context in which it had appeared.

Kill your darlings, they say, but if you just know the line is right, what should you do?

First things first: never ignore story structure, no matter how much you like that line. If the scene can be strengthened or redirected to maintain the line, feel free to do that, but be careful not to slap bandaids on and call it good. If the structure of the story won't support it, you could be killing your story drive, which is a far worse thing than losing the beautiful line. So if you can't justify keeping the scene, then the line has to go...

...somewhere else.

Hey, if you love the line, don't just delete it! Take a few steps to see whether you can keep it in another place.

1. Ask yourself what the line is doing for the story. In my case, the line about foxes is functioning to enhance the setting, and the sense of the narrator's personality. If it's not doing anything, it may simply not belong.

2. Ask yourself if the function performed by that line might work in another location. I happen to have found a spot where I think the line works as internalization that follows a line of dialogue earlier in the scene.

3. If you can't find an alternate spot right away, put the line aside in a place where you'll be able to find it. Maybe that place is the tail end of your file; maybe it's in a separate file of lines that are looking for a home. You might hit on another good place for it, in which case you know where to find it. And if you don't, it's still there for you and might someday work in another story. Not sure how I'd write another story with foxes and flowers, but so far I think I'm doing all right just moving the line slightly!

There are two directions from which to consider your text. Top-down looks at structural elements and considers how the sentences serve them, while bottom-up looks at the sentences as they flow along and tries to identify how they form larger patterns. Neither one can function entirely on its own. Creating a perfect line is an instance of bottom-up success, but for your story to be most successful, it's a good idea to consider what it's doing from the top-down direction as well. When both directions are working together to form a cohesive whole, that's a good recipe for a successful story.

Do you use parallel drafts?

We in the digital age are very lucky that we have the ability to do this, I think - create word files side by side that are almost identical. Parallel drafts are a really good way to test out a major change before you make it. I ran into a situation recently where I was considering getting rid of a character (the brother) in my story. That kind of change has enough possible repercussions over the whole length of the draft that I wasn't just ready to "try it and see." By the time I'd tried it, undoing it would be very difficult, because finding all the instances of places where it had changed the text would be a nightmare.

So I created a parallel draft and added 'No Brother' to the title.

The disadvantage of parallel drafts is that you have to make sure you give yourself a way to keep them distinct. I suppose it would be comparable to losing yourself in a bunch of parallel worlds (world-lines!) and not remembering which one you really belonged in. This is the reason why I only very seldom work with parallel drafts, and when I do, I don't keep them distinct through numbering. For some reason, I can never quite remember which was the most recent number, and it doesn't orient me sufficiently well. I have to put big verbal cues in the file titles, and then once I've executed the change, make a quick decision about which draft is going to become my new "home base." That means not making any subsequent revisions until I've decided which draft is true. If I have to start inserting the same revisions in two different places it drives me nuts.

So if you happen to be in the position of considering a parallel draft strategy, here are my recommendations:

1. Don't do it a lot. Do it only for revisions with very broad consequences over the whole work.
2. Clearly label your parallel draft with a title that reminds you what you did with it.
3. Decide which draft is your home base before moving on to any other revisions.

After putting together my 'No Brother' draft I decided I liked it much better than the other, and the next re-titling that one received was 'Analog Draft.' So all in all, it was a successful endeavor.

Layers of Complexity - Revisions

My friend Janice has a great recent post about keeping up with the fundamentals of writing even after you feel confident that you know them. It's here, and she directs her readers to an interesting post on dialogue by Sara Crowe, here.

One of the things I take away from this is that what we as writers create is larger than our own conscious ability to grapple with it. Thus, even when we "know" a lot of things, it's not possible to hold them all in our minds at once, and it's good to go back later and look consciously at the hints our subconscious has tried to leave behind.

My novel, now in final revisions, has been a real challenge on this score. It's got layers upon layers - so many that I suspect most readers won't even notice a lot of them on the first read-through. I discovered when I first started describing the content of Through This Gate to people that when I gave them the kernel of the story - the query paragraph, really - they had no trouble grasping it. But when I talked about some of the different things I had put into executing the story, they mistakenly guessed it would be difficult to read.

My critiquers tell me it's not difficult to read. Thank goodness.

But this post is intended to be more about writing than about reading. When you're putting together a draft, the most challenging parts of drafting can take a lot of your attention, siphoning it away from other aspects of the manuscript. There's nothing wrong with this. It's totally appropriate.

For example, I have a character who speaks in verse. I can't just write his dialogue all at once. I have to understand the content first, then try to hash out the verse, then go back on a third pass and make sure the verse isn't clunky and the content is appropriately conveyed with all the nuances it needs. On the first pass, I have enough bandwidth to think about the progress of the scene as a whole, the tension etc. required to keep the scene moving forward. On the second pass, I'm not paying attention to the scene at all, but merely trying to get the meter right. On the third pass I'm trying to take the metrical side and the whole-purpose side of things and make sure they match correctly: the verse doesn't distract from the content, nor does the content destroy the verse.

The other thing I've noticed with these revisions is even quite late in the revisions, I keep making tiny error-catches. Spots where I've been so concentrated on the language, and the drive of the story, that I've lost sight of things like the direction from which the sun is supposed to be coming, or what outfit the protagonist is wearing right now and the fact that if she gets turned upside down, yes, her skirt is going to flip up over her head.

My friend Janice also did a post on copy editors, and why we should treasure them. Well, this is one of the reasons. They are trained to tease apart the levels of a story and catch things on all of them - hooray for them!

But in the meantime, we as writers have to keep track as best we can.

It's easy sometimes for me to get demoralized while drafting, thinking about all the revisions I still have ahead of me. But then when I get to them, I generally find I love finding the extra layers of significance. It's perhaps a bit like aging wine; it gains so much complexity and quality with a bit of extra time. Some of my friends and I also like to use the sculpting metaphor, where you take away layers of stone to get to the statue inside. With each level I reach, I discover that being there gives me more insight into the next level.

I try to forgive my conscious brain for not being preternaturally able to capture everything. And I try to trust my subconscious to point things out for me. Then on the second revision, the third or the fourth, I pick up each hint it's left for me. That part is the Easter egg hunt - and I love chocolate.

Breadth and Depth in Stories

I've been short of bandwidth since I got back from Yosemite, for a couple of reasons - one of which is pure exhaustion due to travel and ripping out my lawn. The other reason is that I've been turned back into an edit of my novel manuscript. This edit is a bit more extensive than I'd hoped (I can't imagine anyone getting to the end of the story and going "you know, I really hope this isn't done and there's a lot more work to do"). But it has some interesting aspects, one of which I thought I'd share.

There's a sequence in the midst of the story when my main character gets caught and dragged for quite a long distance across town by an irresistible force, to a place where someone is waiting for her. For some reason, this has been one of the trickiest parts of the book to get right.

If the book were a simple fairy tale, then it might be appropriate for me to use the structure I tried in my first draft of this sequence. Once caught, my main character was dragged along through different kinds of scenery, and encountered successively more complex "gifts" left by the person who was waiting for her. The three-part encounter that we see in Jack and the Beanstalk or The Three Billy Goats Gruff is a perfectly workable model for a story of that kind of simplicity. For a book of the complexity of mine? Ummm, no.

In my second draft of the sequence, I tried to give it a bit more complexity. At this point in the story, two people are fighting over my main character: one whom she's just left, and the other who is waiting for her. So I got rid of the "gifts" and had her getting attacked by the person she's left, who is trying to prevent her from reaching the shelter prepared by the person waiting on the other side. Better. But in the end, though the conflict is more appropriate to the story context, it's still too shallow. It still too closely resembles the fairy tale sequence: character gets dragged through scenery, gets attacked a couple of times, and finally reaches safety. In other words, a bunch of stuff happens, one thing after another, and you don't really learn much more about any of the characters involved, or the world, or the story itself.

Okay, so now I'm rewriting it again. I've maintained one aspect of the draft two model, which is that my main character is being targeted by the person she's left, and being dragged toward someone waiting. But I've ditched the fairytale structure of one thing after another, in favor of having her get more involved in the world itself. Instead of passing by meaningless scenery, she meets some people who try to help her - and as they help her, she learns things. These people help to reveal the scenery with their actions and appearance (they required a bit of research, too). They also give her someone to care about besides herself. They give her an additional perspective on the position she's in, caught between two very powerful people (whom they know about). And by choosing their identities carefully, I've also allowed them to hint at a piece of the novel's backstory that gets revealed later. Now, that's starting to have the kind of complexity that is typical in other areas of this novel - and that means it fits.

What a relief. It's been something of a brain drain - but an interesting process.

Almost There (the agony!)

I'm almost there.

It took me six months to draft the novel I'm currently working on; it's taken me more than a year to revise it, and I now have officially 38 pages to go (though as I remarked in my discussion of writer's block, that can flex considerably due to story problems).

This is where it starts getting hard to wait - on a lot of different dimensions. I feel like the horse running for the stable, in part because I can feel myself in the midst of the end of my plot. The trick is, the climax and resolution of my book actually is about 80 pages long. Here's the hard part: I must not rush.

If I relax and start to rush, I'm more likely to accept the text I've already written. It's easy to say, "Yeah, this is working." Everybody is playing the role they need to play, and the story is progressing - after all, this was always the part of the story that worked best. When I relax and fall into this kind of authorial view, though, I miss opportunities.

There are two stances I use when I write: the authorial stance, and the character stance. This appears to be pretty common among writers. The authorial or editor stance tells me what I want to have happen, and how I want the book to work. The character stance takes me deeper into the story, giving me insight into visceral emotion. One brings order; the other brings chaos.

These two stances should always be in a state of tension.

If I hadn't been thinking from an authorial point of view, I wouldn't have realized that after implying that two guys might fight over my main character right in front of her, I have to follow through on that threat or risk disappointing readers.

If I hadn't been thinking from the character point of view, I wouldn't have understood how incredibly upsetting my main character finds the possibility of witnessing that fight.

If I rush, I'm less likely to be thorough in my double approach to each section of the story. I'm also less likely to understand all the possible consequences, both logistical and emotional, of the events that occur.

Last, but probably worst: if I rush, I'm likely to jump into submissions before I'm ready. I've done this before, and ended up with rejections from a number of agents I admire.

On the other hand, it's hard to say, whether I'd be where I am with this story if I hadn't received the helpful comments I received in those rejections.

If you ever receive a rejection with comments, take a few moments to cry, but then rejoice. The comments agents or editors give you are pure gold. Yes, they're short. Yes, they're generally vague - these people don't have the time to go through your text to back up their opinion with examples. But a comment of any kind shows that the person cared enough to tell you what they thought. It's worth sitting down and trying to figure out why they might have said what they did.

As I approach the end of my story now, I feel good. On edge, of course, because I never know how things are going to turn out in the query process. But good, because I know I've done my best to address the comments I've received, and as a result I can feel how much better the story has become. Forty more pages and it will be ready for critique. Maybe soon after that, ready for queries to go out.

But I must not rush. The end of the story is a time to drive harder, reach deeper, never falter in intensity even on the last page. Maybe then someone will answer my submission and tell me it was all worth it.

Striving for Perfection

I think as writers we all want to write the most amazing things possible - stories that just grab our readers and won't let go.

That takes rewriting.

Sure, I'd like to have my work be perfect the first time. I also know it's not going to be that way. I have particular difficulty with beginnings. For every novel I've written so far, the scene I started the novel with on the first draft isn't the one I was supposed to start the novel with.

Yes, I find this demoralizing. Now when I'm starting out I have to sit down and ask myself very seriously, "Where does the main conflict of the story start?" And I remind myself that a main conflict is not necessarily proprietary to one character, nor does it focus crucially on a character's history or on that character's world. But I still second-guess myself all the time, because I want to get it right. I keep hoping that my first drafts are going to be good.

If I were to let these worries shut me down, though, I'd be nowhere. There's no way to finish a story that you don't start! So I try to think back to writing my big school papers, where people used to say to me, "Write the introduction last. How will you know what you're going to say until you've already said it?" I get all my character, world, and language ducks in a row and dive in, figuring I'll end up returning to the start anyway - because there's no such thing as making it perfect on the first try.

Then, of course, the problem becomes how to know when it's finished. At a certain point you get to a place where you're just changing a word here or there, and you can't see anyplace to make it better. The problem is, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best it can be - it only means that your current view won't show you any way forward. This is the point at which I go looking for critique. Someone else will have a different angle on my story, that will show me where I can go next. As I've discussed here before in Critique and the Writer's Compass, it's important to keep one's own goals in mind at the same time.

One of the most interesting things I've heard about the sculptor Michelangelo was that he said this about sculpting:

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

So the idea is that the sculpture is already there; he just has to sculpt away until he gets to it.

This isn't far off from the way I feel about revision. There is a difference - in my case, I can't see the end product from the start, and only have an idealized vision of what I'm trying to achieve. But this metaphor works for me - and in fact, this is the reason critiques don't bother me (they actually inspire me). I rejoice every time someone gives me a glimpse deeper into my own story, because often enough once I've sensed that deeper level, I can carve the entire story more deeply to match. For me, the perfect story is in there somewhere, and I have to find it. Every revision that pushes the story deeper is one step closer to my goal, and each opportunity for a critique that offers me a fresh view, from a unique angle, is a potential opportunity to see through the veil of stone and find the treasure inside.

Character revisions

Character is a big topic for me.

When I write a story, it's all about the character (the area where I need help is usually plot). I tend to be obsessive about editing in chronological order because I want the story to reflect subtle changes in the character's judgment based on the progression of his or her experience.

I'm currently in the middle of a complete novel revision as a result of this operating principle, and I thought I could elaborate on the idea a little so you can see what I mean. I'll be trying to avoid spoilers, yet be clear.

The character: Dana. Some of you who have explored the site may recognize her name. She's a recent high school graduate heading into a grand adventure as she goes to college for the first time.

The revision: Dana was originally written as an only child, but now I'm giving her an older sister who went off to college the year before, failed, and is depressed and living at home.

The changes: These come in three types.

1. Factual changes. I'm reading through to make sure I don't ever forget that she now has a sister. This one requires attention so I make sure I don't miss any of the instances where a sister-reference might occur.

2. Character Judgment changes. This one is actually requires more attention than the first. The sister is not just a body; she brings with her an entire backstory and set of experiences. The trick is to get these in without actually writing out the backstory. I look for things like this:

Dana makes a comment about how hard it is to sleep in the same room with her new roommate; now she thinks of it in terms of "I haven't shared a room with Caitlyn since I was six."

Dana gets disturbed by the sound of crying in the dormitory hall; now she thinks of it in terms of the awful feeling she gets walking past Caitlyn's door at home.

Dana decides not to tell her parents that she wants to change her name; now she approaches Caitlyn first and her sister calls her stupid before she can even get the whole announcement out, so she never tells anyone else.

Dana hates to hear her mother order Caitlyn around; later when she hears other people getting ordered around, she reacts with extreme revulsion toward the person giving the orders.

3. Changes that make themselves. The best thing about this revision is the stuff I don't even have to change. Writing a story to me is like making a bell: adding a bit of material here or there can change the resonance of the whole, even in areas where not a single word has changed. In the case of story revisions, slight changes in the beginning of the story can drastically alter the feeling of drive in the story, and the sense of emotional magnitude associated with later successes and failures on the part of the protagonist.

The last thing I would say here is not to make changes for no good reason. In my case, I was looking for an opportunity to enhance drive and character motivation, and the "sister change" turned out to be the best option. But before I dived into rewriting the whole darned thing (yikes, but it's a chore!), I made sure to think through in my head some of the major repercussions of the change. When I realized they all looked good, good, good, that was when I took the plunge. Now I'm more excited about the book than ever.