About Revisions
Molly Tenenbaum
What is a revision?
* A piece of writing that you have worked on until your head explodes.
* A piece of writing that you have undertaken to make very very good by doing the following
and more: Rearranging, substituting the general for the specific; expanding where the story or
poem can be deepened; editing for compactness and muscularity, and, if you're using a poetic
form, working to more fully engage with the specific requirements of the form.
* A piece of writing that you have worked on until it surprises you, until it goes in a direction
you never thought of at first, until it teaches you something about writing and yourself.
* A piece of writing that fulfills or extends the promises of the early drafts.
* Although a revision may be longer than the original, adding scenes or stanzas, simply adding
material does not by itseelf constitute a revision.
How do I revise?
* Pay attention to the comments you received in your workshop group. Understand that these
comments represent readers’ honest responses. The comments are neither right nor wrong, but
they are showing you what happens in readers’ minds when they read your work. It is up to you
to decide what to do about this. For example, if readers were confused about something, you
must decide if this confusion suits your purpose or if it needs clarifying. If readers are distracted
by something in your work, you must decide if this distraction suits your purposes, should be
removed, or can be shifted in a different direction.
* For fiction, look at the ideas and exercises in What If?, pages 199-221, and try out some of
them.
* Read “Revision,” starting on page 204 of Making Shapely Fiction.
* For poetry, read the section about revision, starting on page 374 of Thirteen Ways of
Looking for a Poem.
* Keep going through your piece, over and over.
* Eliminate clichés, and any dull or flat language.
* Substitute sensory specifics for generalities. For example, “The sun rose” is a generality.
When it is dawn, and you are looking east, what do you actually see? What colors, shapes,
shadows?
* Where can you deepen the work with metaphor?
* Where can you discover theme, and work toward revealing it?
* Where can you add repetition or motif?
* If you are working in a form, strive to make your poem fit that form even better, while at the
same time using compact language, no extra words, and avoiding twisting syntax just for the
sake of form.
* In fiction, try some of the different techniques for conveying dialogue—see What If?
exercises 27 and 28.
* Conduct Revision Experiments. You can find a long list of these in the
“Instructions/Guidelines” folder. The purpose of these is to allow your piece to become more
than you could at first imagine; to train yourself to write beyond your current abilities. These
experiments are not necessarily new drafts--they are conducted alongside your drafts. They may
produce some material that you can then use in your revision.
Grading Criteria:
Engagement with the assignment, 10 pts: You have fully engaged in the constraints and
opportunities of the assignment, using it to discover new ways of writing and what new things to
say. If there are formal rules, constraints, or options, you have done your best to understand
these, use them, and see how they affect your writing.
Revising for literary quality, 10 pts: From the early draft to the finished version, you are working
to be original and new; to surprise yourself and deepen the work; to eliminate clichés and dull
language; to show rather than tell, illustrate rather than explain; to use everything you know and
are learning about literature.
Grammar and Proofreading, 5 pts: The assignment itself is free of distracting errors. Any
unconventionality is explained by the needs of voice and character, and serves the piece as a
whole.
How to Experiment in Your Drafts
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 have lines of your poem cut up and scattered all over the floor. 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 freewrite on an image in a poem or 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. In
poetry, you could experiment with form, changing the shape of the poem and seeing if that helps
you discover what is central to it. You could keep only the strongest fragment of the original and
develop new portions of a poem toward any new knowledge you may have discovered about
your meaning or purpose. You could keep some stanzas and add others.
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!
Important: Some of your experiments should concern small things (word choice, editing,
sentence-level revision), while others should involve a larger scale (theme, sequence, form).
Specific Revision Experiments
Both Poetry and Fiction
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. 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.
3.
Follow the assignment strictly and carefully.
4. 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?
5. Finding the center, paring down: Choose a paragraph of dense fiction (a paragraph without
dialogue), or a poem, and circle the ten most important words in it. Write these words, in the
order they come in the story or poem, in a column along the right margin of a piece of paper. Set
your poem or passage aside, and rewrite it from memory, with each of these words as an endword of a line. Now look at the original piece again, and compare it to the new one: is there
something to take form the old one and put in the new? something to take from the new and put
in the old? What do you learn about the poem by focusing it around these ten words?
6. 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.
7. Write in active voice. Make it your business to learn what active and passive voice are if
these terms are unfamiliar to you.
8. Experiments in sentence structure: Rewrite a poem or a passage, putting it into two short
sentences and one long one. Study the results. How do these sentence structures change the
rhythm and meaning? Do you want to apply these rhythms to any of the rest of the piece? Does
the tension between the short and long sentences open up things in your story or poem?
9. Version for Dummies: Write a version of your story or poem that over-explains absolutely
everything. Explain, line by line, every abstraction, every metaphor, every obscure reference.
This exercise, I find, helps to highlight the places where I don't know what I'm doing. It also tells
me where in the piece I explain more than I need to. To have an abstract, mysterious version and
a version for dummies helps me find the balance between incomprehensible private meaning and
boring obviousness.
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.
11. Order and sequence: Rewrite the piece backwards, from the end to the beginning. What
does changing the order tell you about your meaning? How might changing the order affect the
reader's experience?
12. Adjectives in proportion: In a poem or passage of dense fiction, count the number of words.
Then count the number of adjectives. What is the ratio of adjectives to total word count? If you
have 25 adjectives and 100 words, the ratio is 1:4--one quarter of the words are adjectives.
Revise the passage so that the adjectives make up no more than one twentieth of the words.
Thus, in your passage of 100 words, you can have 4 adjectives. In a 20-word poem, 1 adjective.
13. Research an element of your piece: Maybe there's a subject in your story or poem that it
might be interesting to know more about. If you're writing about a character who's having
chemotherapy, it might to interesting to know more details about how chemotherapy works.
Maybe there's a word in your poem that you could find out the etymology of (look in the Oxford
English Dictionary--we have it in the reference section of the NSCC library, and also online
through the Seattle Public Library and King County Library). Find out more about some element
of your piece, and take copious notes. Can any of this information be fit in to your piece? Or,
even if it can't be fit in, does it help you understand anything about what you're trying to do?
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. That is, 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. Invite Randomness: There are many ways to do this, but here are some ideas: Find a
website that does translations, and translate your piece into another language and then back into
English again. You'll discover different word combinations. Close your eyes, open the
dictionary, point at a word. Put that word in. Cut your piece into pieces, give the pieces to a
friend, and have the friend create a new order. Listen to music while you write, and put in
whatever comes to mind. The point of all this is to try to think of things you never could think of
if you actually focused your brain on trying to think of things. The point of all this is to discover
new ways to think and use language.
17.
Make up your own game.
Poetry
1. Print out a triple-spaced copy, and write new lines between the old ones, using images to
bridge the gap you've created mechanically. If you want, take it a step farther: drop all the old
lines and see what happens when you look at just the new lines.
2. Put your poem through its paces: Whatever shape and form your poem is, change it. For
example, if it is in long lines, put it in short lines. If it is in short lines, put it in long lines. If it is
in separate stanzas, put it in one long sequence. If it is in one long sequence, break it into twoline couplets or three-line tercets or four-line quatrains. Put the poem through several of these
changes, studying it after each change to see what you discover.
For example, often when I put a long-lined poem into short lines, it becomes suddenly obvious to
me what words are excessive or unnecessary. I see where to pare down. When I break a poem
into shorter stanzas, I get new ideas about how the logic of the poem is working, about what may
be connected to what, and perhaps I'll get some ideas about how to re-order the material. When I
see new words at the ends of the lines, I get new ideas about what reverberations or connotations
might want to be emphasized.
As you put your poem through these changes, you may discover that your poem really wants to
be in a different form. Or, you might make the various additions, shufflings, and edits you've
discovered, and then put the poem back in its original form.
3. Get beyond the known: At the end of your poem, write fifty more lines. Fill up page after
page. What do you get to? Does the writing take any interesting turns? Do you find a new
ending? Can these turns be incorporated?
4. Read through the poem and cut all the adjectives and adverbs. Where do you feel like your
absolutely need one? Instead of replacing the adjective or adverb you used originally, write a
simile or metaphor.
5.
Replace the verbs with verbs that absolutely do not make sense with the existing nouns.
6.
Rearrange all the words in the line whether or not they make sense that way.
7.
Cut all the connecting words such as then, so, and, or, but, et al.
8. Replace all the words in your poem with their opposites, i.e. ice with fire, run with stand, on
with under. You might end up with nonsense, but it'll help clear your head, and you may
discover something wonderful.
9. Does the material feel out of control? Do you feel like there's too much there, but you don't
know what to cut? Rewrite the poem in a form. You can use a traditional form, like a pantoum,
or you can make one up as a game, for example, a series of tercets (three-line stanzas) in which
each line has ten syllables and ends with a consonant that appeared in the previous line. You can
make up any form at all.
10. Punctuation Play: If your poem has no punctuation in it, see what happens if you put
standard punctuation in. Is clarity made? If so, is it helpful to the poem or not? Is ambiguity lost?
If so, is this helpful to the poem or not? If your poem has punctuation, take out the punctuation.
What is the effect? Explore the effects of punctuation or no punctuation while you also change
the linebreaks and so get different word-combinations on a line. I know that for me, sometimes
taking out the punctuation and changing the linebreaks shows me that some words are
completely expendable. So I take them out. Then sometimes I put the punctuation back in.
Sometimes not.
Fiction
1. Answer the following questions, from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, and revise
accordingly:
• What is my story about? I mean, what’s it really about?
• What is the pattern of change?
• Why should the reader turn from the first page to the second?
• Is it original?
• Is it clear?
• Where is it too long?
• Where is it undeveloped in character, action, imagery, theme?
• Where is it too general?
2. Make a map 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?
3. Make a map 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?
4. 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 the situation and get what he or she wants?
Or not get what he or she wants.
5. 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.
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. Experiments in point of view: Choose a passage from your fiction, and re-write it from a
different point of view. If a third person she or a he is telling the story, change it to a first-person
"I." If the first person, or "I" is telling the story, change it to a third person she or he. If you end
up in first person, the writing will be limited to what the "I" knows or feels. If a third-person
speaker is telling the story, experiment with degrees of omniscience. The editorial omniscient
author can
* objectively report what is happening
* go into the mind of any character
* interpret for us any character's appearance, speech, actions, and thoughts, even if the
character cannot
* move freely in time or space to give us a panoramic, telescopic, microscopic, or historical
view
* tell us what has happened elsewhere or in the past or what will happen in the future
* provide general reflections, judgments, truths.
In a limited omniscient viewpoint, you can move with some, but not all of the omniscient
author's freedom. You may grant yourself the right to know what the characters in a scene are
thinking but not to interpret their thoughts. You may interpret one character's thoughts and
actions, but see the others only externally. The most commonly used form of the limited
omniscient point of view is one in which the author can see events objectively and also has
access to the mind of one character, but not to the minds of the others, nor to any explicit powers
of judgment.
Or you might try writing the passage as an objective author, one whose knowledge is restricted
to external facts--details of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch--that might be observed by
anyone.
Study your passage written from several points of view: what does each one have to offer?
What are its limitations? Does a particular point of view seem to suit best the story you want to
tell?
8. Recruit friends to read the dialogue as if it were in a play. Where does it sound smooth?
Where does it sound awkward?