About the Final Fiction Revision
The General Assignment: From any of the four fiction pieces you’ve written so far,
choose one to revise. Do three Fiction Experiments from the list provided below, and do
everything else you can to revise this piece into something finished and polished. It can
remain as a series of scenes, or you can work toward a finished story. See further
explanation below.
Points: 40
Deadline: 9am, Monday, Week 11.
Format and order: The Revision Reflection and the Final Revision should be doublespaced. Include all elements below in a single .doc or .rtf file, in this order, from top to
bottom.
1. Your Revision Reflection (about 500-700 words) This is a narrative in which
you describe your revision process. Talk about how you developed your piece,
what choices you made, what revision experiments you tried, and what their
effects were. Talk about how you decided, after all the experiments, what your
final piece should be. The more detail here, the better, as detail reveals your
involvement with the revision process. Like the poetry revision Reflection, this is
a very in-depth look at your revision process.
2. Following that, include your brilliant, wonderful, original, and polished
Revision.
3. Following that, include the three Revision Experiments.
4. Following that, include other notes and drafts, if any exist.
What is a revision? Your revision might end up adding scenes, and making your piece
longer, taking the story further. Or it might not--you might still stay with the same basic
scenes. Either way, the piece will be worked with extensively. In this class, a revision is a
piece of writing that you’ve thought about, re-worked, re-made, and thought about some
more until your head explodes. You probably have some changes that you know you
want to make—things that have come up in your workshop discussion and from my
feedback, so your revision will likely make those changes. But I would also like you to
take this opportunity to enlarge your imagination of what your story might be, and to let
yourself create something you couldn't have thought of when you first started.
Your revision might end up using a lot of the resulting material—or it might not. Either
way, you’ll have made some discoveries about what’s possible. The experiments are
to help you find depth in your work, to help you find things in it that you don't know yet
are there, to enable you to find more ways to write. Consider the following:
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A good piece of fiction is so original it makes us shiver and tingle. Even if it uses
age-old plot elements, something about the approach is new and interesting.
The way the words are put together surprises us--the words are really working to
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get across something this author and only this author could say.
The story goes where we wouldn't expect, or it gets to an expected place in a
surprising way.
Often something about the writing surprises the writer too--the characters took on
lives of their own, or the story touched something deep that the writer didn't know
it was going to.
Everything in it counts, every word, image, and action.
Everything in it not only counts, but counts double--for example, description can
carry the plot forward, dialogue can deepen the conflict, etc.
Also, a revision should use the elements of craft we've been learning about it
Burroway:
Show Show Show! Use detail, image, gesture, dialogue, and action to convey the
story. Tell a story in specific scenes that dramatize the main events of the story.
Use narration and summary where you want to move quickly to the next scene,
cover something that's not a main turning point, or provide some background
information. However, first make sure it wouldn't be better to convey this
information by showing.
Consider all the ways or showing character, and of using fictional place and time.
Make sure the point of view is consistent and believable. If you shift points of
view, make sure the shift is clear to the reader.
Clear up confusions readers might have.
Edit your dialogue tags: Always try to get the dialogue and action to convey
what's going on, rather than the letting the dialogue tag do the work. Compare
""You make me mad," he said angrily,' to '"I can't stand this," he said, sweeping
his arm across the table so all the dishes crashed to the floor.' Sometimes you
don't need dialogue tags at all.
Go over every word carefully and make sure you need it. Rewrite and reshape
sentences so that every word adds something.
Make sure any errors in grammar or spelling are deliberate, serving a purpose,
required to convey voice and character.
Grading of the Revision
Reflection, 5 points. The reflection describes your revision process detailing your
experiments and their results, discussion your decisions, and showing you actively
involved with every word of your piece; it shows how you have urged your piece to find
its true being, meaning, language, tone, imagery, music, and form. If you have purposely
used unconventional grammar or punctuation or formatting, discuss your reasons here.
The depth of the experimentation, 15 points: The three experiments are included, and
drafts are both included and described in your Reflection. The drafts and experiments
show you working not only with small-scale decisions of word-choice and sentence, but
also with the larger development of theme or idea. The drafts show you discovering what
the story wants to be and do. Your whole revision package shows that you have deeply
explored the possibilities of your work, tried this and that, adding material, taking
material away, evaluating each change and deciding what to do with it. The revision
shows that each word, sentence, image, or action has been chosen for its effect on the
reader and on the piece as a whole.
The quality of the result, 15 points: The revision should show that you have worked to
improve the quality of your writing, practicing to
 express yourself by means of image, and action, and the music of language rather
than by generalization; to show rather than to tell;
 use sentence rhythms to convey meaning;
 make every word count, and count double, using language compactly;
 eliminate clichés;
 consider the elements Burroway addresses: creating believeable characters and
dialogue, establishing the location, managing time with scene and summary,
developing conflict.
 clarify distracting confusions;
 create a strong opening and a strong ending;
 surprise yourself
 and last but not at all least, the revision shows that you have tried your best to be
brilliant and original, to say new things in new ways, to get at complex meanings
that you may not have known about when you started, which only literature is
complex enough to express. Take risks with your writing!
Polish of surface, 5 points: The revision has been carefully proofread. It finds and
corrects unintentional errors of grammar and syntax. The revision's appearance on the
page is as you intend. Variations on conventional grammar and punctuation are
explainable according to the demands of form and tone and voice and character. I
recommend that if you are using intentional unconventional elements (for example
sentence fragments, grammar errors, lack of punctuation, or partial punctuation), you
discuss them in your Reflection to let me know that they are deliberate. Otherwise, if they
read to me like mistakes, I will assume they are mistakes, and grade accordingly.
Fiction Revision Experiments
Instructions: Choose at least three of these experiments to work with during your fiction
revision process. You may do more!
The general idea: During your revision process, you will make a mess. You might have
one paragraph of the original followed by several pages of freewriting that expands on
some nugget in that paragraph. You might try adding sections, developing fragments or
images. You might urge a scene toward a whole story, making characters more real,
adding scenes, developing conflict. You might insert motifs here and there. You might
free-write on an image in a story and see if you come up with things you can use in the
revision. You could rewrite the same scene or fiction piece, but this time with more
knowledge of where it's going and what it's about, so that every detail is focused toward a
central theme or conflict.
At several stages of revision, your piece will probably be in shreds and bits. You will feel
like you’re starting over and the whole thing is crap. You will have no idea if you’re
making it better or worse. That’s how it is. Just keep on going!
The Experiments
(not in any particular order)
1. Do everything your readers suggest: Follow the suggestions of any comments you
received, then make your own decision about whether they work or not.
2. If the original version didn't precisely follow the assignment, write a version that
more closely follows the assignment, and see what happens.
3. Edit out every word or phrase that seems the least bit dull or familiar. Decide if it
needs replacing with something more original, or if it was better the way it was,
or if it is necessary at all.
4. Make a map or outline of your plot, showing where the moments of conflict are
(internal or external, between characters or within a character, and showing where
power shifts between characters. Who is “winning” at any one moment?
5. Make a map or outline of your plot, showing where there is connection or
disconnection between characters. At what moments to characters connect?
Where do they reject each other? Is someone included or excluded?
6. Experiments with scenes: Stories are usually told by means of scenes. What
scenes already exist in your story? Could any of these scenes be expanded so as to
accomplish more? What if your story were to be told by means of other scenes?
Which would they be? Are there undeveloped places in your story that would be
interesting to develop into full-fledged scenes? What would happen if some
currently minor places in the story got developed into lengthy scenes? What
would happen if what currently is told by means of summary and narration were
to be illustrated in a scene instead?
7. Follow the original assignment even more strictly and carefully.
8. Interleaving expansions: Read your piece carefully, hunting for every word or
phrase that seems even the slightest bit general, or that you have even the slightest
inclination to say more about. Look for those places where you may have been in
a hurry during the early drafts, or where you may have given up in the frustration
of trying to describe things accurately. Insert after every one of these, more detail,
development, description, imagination--whatever is appropriate for the situation.
As you do this, you may discover that you can cut out the original generality and
substitute one of these other images. Or you may discover an idea or theme you
didn't know was there. Or?
9. Highlight all uses of the verb "to be" in any form. Cut them and focus on using a
more active, dynamic verb. do the same thing with any use of the verb "to
become." To do this, you’ll probably have to radically rearrange syntax; simply
substituting other verbs doesn’t necessarily do the trick.
10. What if the piece has a different source, a different motive? Rewrite the story or
poem as if it is a message to your lover. As if it is to your mother. As if it is to a
stranger. As if someone else is telling the story.
11. Order and sequence: Change the order of things around. For example, let the story
begin with what's now the last scene, or put the current opening scene in the
middle. What does changing the order tell you about your meaning? How might
changing the order affect the reader's experience?
12. Freewrite on a motif or symbol: Let yourself write as much as you can,
brainstorming about all the different forms your motif or symbol can come in, and
what it might mean. For example, I'll start a freewrite on the motif of "lips":
Certainly they're on people. Lipstick prints on glasses. The lip of a tunnel or hole-scary, the unknown, a turning point. Don't give me any of your lip. Fat lips, thin
lips. Thin lips--anger or prudery...
13. Research an element of your piece: Maybe there's a subject in your story
interesting to know more about, or that you need vocabulary for. If you're writing
about a character who's having chemotherapy, it might to interesting to know
more details about how chemotherapy works, for example.
14. Let your characters dream: Write down your characters' (or speaker’s) dreams. Be
loose, wild, imaginative; don't worry about meaning or believability. Read over
what you've written. Possible you'll be able to include one of these dreams in your
fiction. Or maybe you can include some of the elements of these dreams in other
ways. For example, if your character has a dream of a flight of crows blocking the
sky, maybe you can make her black hair shine like crow feathers, or her eyes take
a long time to adjust to the darkness in a room when she suddenly comes in out of
the sun. If a character dreams that she can't get out the door and go to work
because she can't find her shoes, and then when she does find them there are two
left ones only, and then when she finds a right shoe it has no laces, you can give
your character some similar kind of shoe problem as she's getting ready to go to
work. See if you can use the images from the dreams in any way that helps to
develop the conflict or the characters in your story.
15. Experiment visually: Here are a few possibilities, and probably you can invent
others: Draw a picture of your character. Draw a map of the setting. Illustrate your
poem or story. Draw panels as in a comic book. Make a collage of elements from
your poem or story.
16. Answer these questions: Who is the protagonist? What is his or her goal? What
does he or she want? What internal characteristic keeps him or her from getting
it? What external force keeps him or her from getting it? What factors complicate
the situation? What character trait enables the protagonist to solve (or not solve)
the situation and get (or not get) what he or she wants?
Then, cut any scene or narration or sentence or word that is not relevant to the
plot you outlined above, or re-write it so it becomes relevant.
17. Experiments in point of view: Choose a passage from your fiction, and re-write it
from a different point of view.
18. Make up your own revision game (make sure your Reflection describes it).