GRIT + PEARL is my monthly letter about all the annoying stuff that goes into writing books and being a person who writes books (or other stuff, I don’t know, I’m not your boss). You can sign up here. Here’s January’s letter.
No. 1 – Revising REVERIE, Revising In General
Okay I know that it’s very fashionable to tell people there’s no one way to write, and sure, that’s true, but because this is MY blog, I’m going to flatly inform you that I’ve figured out revising. And I can say this because I just turned in my revisions for REVERIE, and since it doesn’t come out for an ENTIRE YEAR no one can see for themselves whether or not I did a good job.
But I did a good job. And I do feel powerfully successful about these revisions. And it’s a completely interior sense of success, because I proved to myself that I did what I’d set out to do, and that’s thanks to my Very Structured Ryan Process. Of course there are writers who think employing this level of structure is bananas, but whose letter are you reading? Not theirs.
So here’s how I revise. Take what you want, leave the rest. If this works, let me know. If this doesn’t work, dial the fake number I give out at bars.
Before you begin, do the following
GATHER – First I take all the feedback I’ve gotten from critique partners and beta readers, and I burn it. Kidding! I annotate it and figure out the consistent things, good and bad, people are responding to. This Grit+Pearl letter isn’t about critique but I will say this: if you respect the person giving you feedback, say “Thank you” and little else. Resist the urge to explain away the bad about your book. Your explanation if your revision. Get it right and prove you listened.
DAYDREAM – I respond to feedback by first saying thank you, and then politely excusing myself so I can vanish into the daydream of what I wish I’d written. But, like an anthropologist, I take notes. With any project, I explore the dream of what I’m trying to create until I can answer the following: what is my thesis or argument? What am I trying to say, to prove, and to evoke? What do I want this book to be known for, remembered for? For me, I need to have this vision firmly in place, because it’s what I build my revisions around.
ORGANIZE – Now that you’re familiar with your feedback, and you’re clear on your work’s point, thesis, or goal, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to address each in the text itself. If you feel like withering in the grip of dread, feel free to just get started. If, like me, you’re too busy to re-write your book 9 times, create an outline of what you’re changing. This isn’t an outline of the book. Instead, this outline has the following sections:
Revisions Outline
Meta-Structure: remember when I asked you for your thesis? Here’s where you document for yourself how you’re going to achieve that argument. What changes do you need to make to ensure you accomplish this? Have you said what you need to say? If not, why not? What’s missing?
Plot Structure: Okay, now that we know the goal, let’s look at the path towards it from a plotting sense. I recommend outlining your scenes (this book is cheap and has a great methodology for it), or at least outlining your book so that you can keep track of the problem areas. Record for yourself what plot changes need to happen, and what you’ll do for each problem you’ve uncovered.
Emotional Structure: Now that you’ve got your plot worked out, you need to ensure that the arc of your characters delivers. For YA, we need that character arc to be pronounced. Your characters are often the vector for the point you’re trying to make. Do they do this? If not, why not? Outline where your main character begins emotionally, and where they need to end. Do their scenes amount to a steady growth? Are their responses to each new challenge aligned to their growth? If not, how will you fix this?
The above three sections are not chronological. You may make big changes to your plot based on your emotional delivery revelations. You might change your characters based on your meta-structure. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, so long as you dream up your solutions for each, and then…
Put your damn pins in
Just like a seamstress marks up a garment and inserts pins before even picking up a pair of scissors, you’re going to take all of your insights and turn them into directions for yourself. Some even place these directions right into the manuscript as small notes. I prefer annotating my scene chart with the changes I need to make, so that I can follow along in an outline as I revise the text from start to finish.
You’ll want to start with your biggest, most scary structural changes, and prioritize cutting out what you know you no longer need. There’s no sense editing doomed words. We’re serious writers, we don’t embalm our drafts. If you spook easily at this, save pretty passages in your outline doc and call them scraps, like me. You’ll never return to them, but you know they’re safe.
Polishing
After I make all of my big updates, and after I check to ensure my structures are in place, I do a polish pass to make sure the book actually, you know…reads well? Knowing I’m polishing at the end frees me up from focusing on individual words while I do the bigger stuff. In this final round, I promise myself that I will:
- Pay close attention to your transitions and pacing
- Polish out rough, revision language and shorthand
- Firm up dialogue
- Confirm I am a genius for even thinking of all this cool shit
Polish is a low-impact phase for me, because I’ve done so much ahead of time to ensure I can focus on the language by the end of my revision. A fun thing I also do during polish is cross stuff off my outline, ensuring I’ve made good on all the promises my outline represents. By the end, I’ve got a much better book in hand, and I’ve got a very bloody outline to prove it.
Homework
I love a good ol’ scene chart. I think you should make one for your current book, and see if it tells you anything important. I use excel (or Google sheets) to create mine, and my columns are:
- NUMBER – just number all these scenes out, it’s not that hard.
- LOCATION – Setting.
- SUMMARY – What happens or needs to happen?
- MOTIVE – what’s your main character’s motive in this scene?
- OUTCOME – what’s the outcome of the scene? Are we being propelled towards next steps? What’s the RESULT of what you’ve written?
- POINT – what’s your point as the author for including this? Why’s it here?
- NOTES – any small notes to yourself, such as hints that need to be in the text for future shit to make sense. Or revision ideas.