This week I’m working on revising fiction with my undergraduate and grad students at Fordham. Below are some of the tips and ideas I’ve collected over the years that my students find most useful. (Next week I’ll talk in this space about the best exercises I’ve found for revising nonfiction.)
1) First, answer these questions:
What is my story about? Another way of saying this is: What is the pattern of change? Once this pattern is clear, you can check your draft to make sure you’ve included all the crucial moments of discovery and decision. Is there a crisis action?
2) Write three new openings. Each one should be at least a paragraph long. In each opening, start from a different moment in the story – maybe even at the very end.
3) For a dialogue scene in your story/novel: go back and ground it in the physical world by adding:
a. two actions or gestures that will help us see another important character
b. two physical descriptions of another character that will help us visualize him or her
c. two setting or atmosphere details that will help put readers in the scene
4) The dramatic elements of a story/novel – crisis, power shifts, emotional connections, and withdrawals – are often mirrored on a smaller scale within a scene.
Try analyzing one of your own scenes, asking yourself:
a. What kind of power does each of the main characters have?
b. Where is there at least one shift in power – or even a failed attempt to take power?
c. Where is there at least one moment of making or breaking the emotional connection between the characters? Does it raise the emotional temperature?
d. Is there a mini-crisis or turning point? Something that is said or done, however minor, after which things cannot go back to quite the way they were before?
5) Are your most important lines in direct dialogue, or summarized? Generally, these should be direct. Is information or idle chatter direct or summarized? Generally, these should be summarized. Revise to make sure that the most important moments are in direct dialogue.
Good to see your blog… both for improving my own writing as well as working with my students.
This is really interesting, Christina, but I don’t quite understand what you mean by “pattern of change.” Did I miss a blog about this? Or can you write one??
I tell my students that the simplest way to think about telling a story is this: something has to change. This change can be internal or external or both. What is the change that occurs, and how does it happen? This is the pattern of change. It’s useful to identify how (and, in many cases, if) the change occurs in revision, and not so much before — to wait until all your unconscious forces have done their work.
Christina,
One of my best revision tricks is to print a version of the ms in the ugliest font (for me, that’s courier) and change all the characters’ names. This doesn’t make the ms completely unrecognizable, but it’s the best I can do to try to get “fresh eyes” without waiting months to reread. The font trick is to make the thing look as in-progress as possible. It’s really hard to tear apart a draft that looks physically attractive.
Love the three different openings trick. I’ll pass it on to my students and use it myself!
[…] when you’re revising it helps to have a specific assignment. Last week in this space I listed some exercises that my fiction-writing students find useful. Here are some revision ideas that my memoir and […]
Excellent advice. I’m about to do the three opening thing right now!
[…] come alive…again. One of my favorite writer/bloggers, Christina Baker Kline, has a host of suggestions for how to jumpstart a revision. My favorite? Write three new openings. In each opening, start from a different moment in the story […]