TOOLS OF REVISION (part 2)

In part 1 of "Tools of Revision" we talked about the revision process in broad strokes of theory and how to build your story for easier editing. With those still in mind, this follow up will focus on some of the more useful tools you can deploy in your revision process, the contents of your tool box.  As with anything, it might take a few attempts to get the hang of these tools; and hopefully some of them will be just as fun as using the nail gun.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Change The Lens:

Hemingway famously said “The essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, bullshit detector;” he also famously said “Write drunk, edit sober.” What both of these get at is the need to develop a way to look at your work from a different vantage point. We talked about the need for paradigm shifts yesterday, but today we’re going to go into specific tips to do so.  

Here are three useful tips:

•         Time Management: Many writers have a writing schedule that they stick to; this is a good thing, as just getting yourself to write can sometimes be a herculean task. I believe I’d read somewhere that Stephen King does the bulk of his writing during the mornings and early afternoon, and reserves the evenings for editing. I generally do the inverse, taking advantage of the caffeine boost in the morning, and writing with a frosty libation in the evening. The important thing is to find a schedule that works for you. If you’re a morning person maybe you wake up early and write before heading into work. If you take the train, you can work on your manuscript during your commute, as Tim Wendel and Sergio De La Pava have done to complete their works.  Whatever works for your schedule, but treat it like a part-time job you do on the side until it can become something more.

(Keep in mind, writing is very much a job, one requiring hard, hard work to get better at; and, just like any other industry, no one is going to bump you up to a C-level position based off the piece of notebook paper you’ve sent them for a fresh idea when you’ve never put pen to paper before. This isn’t The Hudsucker Proxy [Coen, 1994]. And Limitless [Burger, 2011] lied to you—about a great number of things—but principally here in that you will never get paid an advance to write a novel that isn’t already written when you’ve never before been published. You have to put in the work. Then, eventually, you might be able to turn that part-time unpaid internship into a minimum-wage supplement, and then, if you’re lucky, make it your full-time career. You have to climb the ladder.)

•         Upset The Order: However well the above system works, sometimes you can become too ingrained in your habits and aren’t able to get the fresh eyes you need. You can try flipping your schedule for an easy change. Or you can try reading your story during the time when you’d normally be reading your leisure materials, whether that be in the evening, when you’re going to bed, or during your commute—hopefully not while driving. Try to surprise yourself or catch yourself off guard. Email it to yourself and read it as though it were a lengthy newsletter from one of the myriad lists you’re on, or as another of Johnson from Accounting’s weekly exegeses on teamsmanship and cultivating a positive workplace attitude—that loser.

•        POV is VIP: This is the trick I’ve been using the last couple years and it has drastically improved my writing. Imagine your story wasn’t written by you but was written by your enemy, your evil twin, and you’re reading the work with the intention of excoriating it. You’ve got a fresh, juicy red pen in hand and are salivating to rip it to pieces. What cracks can you find in the armor? Where can you slip in the knife?  

Or, better yet, imagine that person was reading your work. What might they say?  What parts might they take issue with?  Where do you see that red pen going? And, the real goal here, can you defend or refute that criticism?  If it’s just because your enemy is a philistine and wouldn’t know the difference between Matisse and Gen. Mattis, maybe pick a better enemy (thought that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong). If the whole story hinges on the fact that it’s a response to an obscure French novel from the 1700s, it’s very, VERY probable you need to rework that story.  

More likely what you’re going to find are questions like: Did you just put that in there to be controversial? To be gross? Are you using that particular word because you think it makes you sound smart? Does the sex scene really need to be 25-pages long and include illustrations? You know, that sort of thing.

This last trick is especially useful as that is how almost anyone else will read your story, asking those types of questions. Not necessarily with the same animosity as your enemy, but certainly looking for any weaknesses. If we’re going back to our structural metaphor, every reader—especially those of the publishers or agents who are reading your work—are examining the house of your story with the keen eye of an engineer or building inspector (one you can’t pay off). They’re looking for shoddy craftsmanship, places where you cut corners, places that might pose a danger to the tenants, testing for structural weakness. 

Remember, you’re going up against a plethora of other stories—a metropolis filled with other houses, condos, high rises, subdivisions—and every person who reads your story that is not your mom is looking for a reason to reject it or do anything else with their time. That might sound discouraging, but it’s true, and the sooner you realize that the better writer you’ll become. After all, you do the same thing yourself every time you peruse a book, journal, or article, every time you scroll down the news feed of Facebook or Twitter, looking for a reason to shut it down and move onto the next one. Or a cat video. 

It’s Not "Goodbye;" It’s Just "Not Now:"

Of course, parting with your work is never an easy thing to do. You might have a few lines that you just absolutely love but which do not belong in your story. In these cases, it can be useful to transition your work from your revision file to a discard pile before you’re ready to commit it to the recycle bin. These tips will help you do just that:

·         Temporary Housing: I’ll often either highlight a section that’s on the chopping block or else change the font to red. I’ll read through the passage again, skipping over the colored portion, and see if that omission made sense. If not, I can quickly change the color back without risking a loss of the data. Generally speaking, nine times out of ten, once you’ve decided something can go in the red, chances are it probably belonged there, and really shouldn’t get a reprieve and go back to the black.

But if you’re still not ready to let go try this next one.

·         Alternate Universes: Almost without fail, I will save the copy of my first draft of a story and work on my revisions in a separate file. That way I can make drastic changes and delete with confidence, knowing that, if I need to, I can go back to early drafts and reacquire the text if need be. Usually, I find I never need to—though I’m not immune to a few bad habits myself from time to time.  

·         Snippets: If you’re still not ready to say adieu, creating a separate document or repository for pieces you’ve deemed not germane to the work can be a good way to get rid of them without giving them a permanent funeral (my one and only beer AND metal reference for the day). This is especially useful when working on novels or longer works that may have pages and pages of cut material, sometimes entire chapters or characters.

Of course, this data is still there, and that presents a problem as well. D.T. Max’s New Yorker article, The Unfinished, about the late, great David Foster Wallace, highlights these dangers and a pivotal moment in Wallace’s maturation as a writer: “Eventually, he learned to erase passages that he liked from his hard drive, in order to keep himself from putting them back in.”

Really what it comes down to is a matter of comfort and discipline. You need to get comfortable with the idea of deleting; and you need to develop the discipline to stick to a method for making those cuts and/or not putting them back in. There’s no right or wrong way to get to that point, but hopefully these tools will be a good starting point for you to find a method that works best for you.  

Beta Test:

One of the most useful tricks I’ve found for editing—especially when getting closer to the final or penultimate round of proofing—is to read the story in a new format. Your 12pt, double-spaced, Times New Roman manuscript formatting is not how the story will actually appear once published.  You can become too accustomed—or fall in love—with how the story looks in manuscript form, only to find it clunky or awkward once you’ve seen the galleys.   

There’s also the fact that every writer develops blind spots on their own work after looking at it over and over and over again. Tweaking. And then over and over and over it again once more. And you cannot count on Spellcheck to find all those errors. Many of these come in the way of double articles or prepositions, which your grammar checking tools won’t catch. This is your “on the on the,” your “and but,” your “the an,” etc. They can slip past you 100 times in the same format, but once you see it in another they will jump out and you can correct them.

The best way to get past these blind spots and see your work in a fresh light is to read your story in the format you’ve most envisioned for it—perhaps in the magazine of your dreams or how it might be look in a bound paperback. This will also give you a great vantage to see how it stands up to the competition.

If, like with many of us writers, your dream is to find your story published in the pages of The New Yorker, consider putting your story into a 3-column format, changing the font to something closer to Georgia (so you’re not still in TNR), and making it single-spaced. If you really want, throw a block or two in for photos or ads—though that might be taking the fantasy a little far (especially when, as with most of us, the chances of that dream coming true are equivalent to winning the lottery; still, you can’t win if you don’t buy the ticket, right?). Read through your story in this new format, and then pick up a copy of the magazine and compare them side by side.

If you’re working on a book-length work, consider giving your novel a beta test of the interior design. There are several great websites out there, such as The Book Designer, that have a few open-source or low-cost options for interior book formatting. Even if you pay for one, $60 is a relatively small price to pay considering other costs and all that’s at stake. Read through your book in this format, either by printing it out as your own galleys, or save a small grove of trees and read and edit it on your tablet—which will give you an idea how it will look on there as well.   

Read It Aloud:

Of course, one of the best ways to test your story is to simply read it aloud. Put on your smoking jacket, prepare a brandy, and climb into your armchair near the fireplace and let those sultry tones bring your story to life. Okay, maybe you don’t need to do all of that—or any of that—but reading your story aloud does help bring it to life. After all, you wouldn’t write a symphony on sheet music and never have it played by actual instruments would you?  

You might notice: patterns you weren’t aware of, phonically or syntactically; or that there’s an unbearable amount of consonance or clunky adverbs; just a bit too much purple alliteration; or maybe some of those words were a bit erudite for the story. I’ve certainly found passages I’ve been embarrassed to utter, not for any thematic reasons (believe it or not), but because they just seemed a bit heavy-handed, pedantic, or maudlin for what I was trying to do. As uncomfortable as watching an all-children performance of a Eugene O’Neill play.  

Reading aloud is also a great way to test dialects and accents. If you’re trying to nail down a particular voice for a character, why not give that character a voice, a test drive. This is true not just for accents but for any narrative voice.  William Gaddis’ JR—told almost exclusively through dialogue, and with mostly just the characters’ particular syntax used to identify the speaker—is practically begging to be read aloud and I would pay good money (if I had any) to hear tapes of Gaddis lending his own voice to these characters (if it even exists).

Reading aloud is nothing new; it’s been championed before from plenty of other writers over the years, but that’s simply because it works.  

You vs You:

Again, there’s no one, correct, unimpeachable salve to editing. It’s whatever works for you. You yourself are your biggest impediment to the process: your closeness to the project, your inherent bias towards the work, the fact that you’ve been looking at it through only your eyes, etc. What these tools aim to do is allow you to break through the barrier of yourself, to splinter that bias, and help you get into the frame of mind necessary to see what a third party might see.  

Far and away the best tool I gained from my graduate writing program experience was the ability to see my own shortcomings, habits, and pitfalls; the ability to begin to be my own best editor (an ongoing process). Hopefully, these suggestions will help you get to that point as well.

--A.V. Bach is a writer and musician living in Chicago, IL. He holds a BA in English from Syracuse University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in the US and UK in such literary journals as Gone Lawn, Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, and Gargoyle. You can purchase his debut novel, “Eisenstein’s Monster,” here, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or you can order it through your local bookstore or library.