9. Decide whether you will amend your first draft or begin again with a new manuscript.
This is a big decision and it is hard to make a general recommendation. If you see problems (or, perhaps a better way to think of it, possibilities) in just about every chapter; if you see a way to up the energy and power of the story; if you want to take the story to a new plane; start with the first page and write. This can be energizing, productive, and, ultimately, the most efficient way to proceed.
This doesn’t mean you have to “start all over,” although you might want to. You have all these notes, all this work, the ideas, the scenes. You have been developing a section-by-section guide of scene sequences, which you can complete before you begin writing a new draft. You can annotate the section guide with references to the old passages you should reread as you come to those chapters. Back and forth, old and new, you bring the history of your dream with you into its new version. All the work you did in the first draft; all the work you did in exercises; all the work you’ve done in this stage (“The Plan”): You draw on the material as you progress through an orderly start-to-finish reshaping or rewriting. That’s a revision.
Be very wary of cut-and-paste. Even if you know you are going to use “these two pages,” retyping them provides the necessary bridge from two new passages, and even if you change only a few words, take out a sentence or two, it will help you maintain coherence and flow.
I urge you to create a new, orderly overview of the novel made up of these items:
Your foreground timeline, identifying key events.
A summary of the novel.
Separate summaries of the three parts of the novel.
Scene sequences organized in sets, key event to key event.
Scene sequences organized into chapters, with taglines.
A note from ancient days: All my novels were written on a typewriter, so there wasn’t any way for me not to rewrite, and my experience was that even if I thought I had a great chapter, once I got to retyping it into the new manuscript, I made some amendments.
I also found that index cards worked well for me because I could key them to old chapters and pages, and look back at the old draft as a reminder, but use the cards to guide me in the new writing. I guess what I’m saying is, don’t let your computer do too much of your revising for you. One way or another, as you do a revised draft, you have to enter it in a new file, page by page. That helps you maintain the voice of the story consistently. It gives you flow.
Don’t rush. Don’t dawdle. Don’t doubt.
10. Write a document that describes your love of your story.
Reflect on the work you have done and all you have accomplished. Restate your resolution. Respect the process that is taking you forward.
Don’t skip this step!
Consider the questions I raised earlier, in the section on the novel continuum.
Does the idea of the story seem fresh? If you have even the slightest uneasiness that a cliché is lurking, weed it out. Your tools: What if? What else? Often all it takes is a twist in one character trait, one plot point, to brighten your story.
Is the story line well constructed? Does it come together satisfactorily—but not too early? Is it predictable or surprising?
Is there someone to love?
Is there something to fear?
Does someone grow up?
Do you hear a storyteller’s voice in your telling?
Could something be louder, quieter, stronger, scarier, more loving, more alone, more important? Why not make it so?
Consider these issues, and if something nags at you, use it as a starting point for reconsidering elements of the story as you review your notes. Maybe walk away for a week. When you come back, you may think you were just being negative. Or you may be able to put your finger on a fault line and fix it.
Three: The Process
Warm up
If you haven’t done some of the exercises yet, this would be a good time to look at them. Generating new material from prompts gets you in a fresh frame of mind and gives you more to draw from in revision.
Review or generate new material. Give yourself time to experiment: Rewrite a section from a different POV. Open the novel in a different place on the timeline. Use a different narrative strategy. Identify new plot points. Adjust your outline.
Fine-tune your premise (statement of aboutness). Write a two- or three-sentence description you might show to a reader, agent, or editor. Make a “premise banner” and put it on the wall.
Write jacket copy or back copy for the novel. Write a dream review.
1. Review or generate new material. As you rewrite passages, tuck them in with the draft chapters. Don’t worry right now about fit and transition. Don’t pull away because you see yourself going in a new direction—you can always turn back later. Don’t be afraid of pushing your vision, your inventiveness, your emotions. Choose points in the story where you have deep feelings, or you want to solve a puzzle or try out a new idea. You may write a new scene 150 pages in that gives you a whole new vision.
2. Fine-tune your premise (statement of aboutness). I promise you, everyone finds this to be a tough assignment. It might take you twenty tries to get a statement you can show someone. You have been working on this throughout the book. You’ve seen your statement evolve. Working on it has always been about giving yourself a beacon, a guide. Now consider if you have a statement yet that is ready for prime time: sharing it with a fellow writer, showing it to an editor or agent. You want the statement to represent exactly what you believe you have written (will write?). You want it to grab a reader. You want to think of it in the New Reads section of your favorite magazine. One more time.
3. Write jacket copy or back copy for the novel. Before you write jacket copy or a review, read a lot of examples. Look at what the “flap copy” (the description that begins on the left flap of a hardcover book’s jacket) accomplishes—how it draws you in as a reader without giving too much away. I’ve always written flap copy and put it in front of my manuscript. It helps my agent talk about the book; it helps an editor talk about it to colleagues; it helps publicists. Nobody expects this from you, but if you feel confident and excited about writing it, why not pass it along? And for right now, it helps you pin your story down to its essence.
Then look at how people “blurb” one another. What do you wish someone would say about your book? Or (my preference) look at paperback reprints, where there are often passages about the book that replace front flap copy (there’s no front flap), but are usually a little shorter. What do you think would pull a reader in?
Read reviews to see what gets talked about, what makes reviewers carp or praise. See what reviewers have said about books you’ve read and whether you agree. Then imagine what someone might write about your story. Someone who “got it.” Don’t be shy.
Revise
Write a new summary of the novel without reviewing old versions. Compare your various summaries and refine the latest one. Expand into three summaries, one for each movement of the novel (beginning, middle, end). This is your guide for revision.
Develop your outline: a section-by-section guide. Write scenarios of chapters. Write beat sheets for scene sequences.
Review the passages, scenes, and chapters from the first draft that you will use in the revision. Annotate for needed adjustments. Insert notes for new scenes and chapters.
Spell out your strategy for tackling the revision. Establish a calendar and schedule. Plan for breaks and rewards.
Rewrite the first chapter.
Write new chapters nested in the sequence of the manuscript.
Write a new summary of the novel without reviewing old versions. Compare your various summaries and refine the latest one. Expand into three summaries, one for each movement of the novel (beginning, middle, end). This is your guide for re
vision. Review and perhaps revise your foreground timeline.
You know about summaries by now, so do it. This is the flow of the story, compressed. Not the details, not the descriptions, just the pure resonance of Story. This should be exciting and affirming.
Develop your outline: a section-by-section guide. Write taglines and scenarios of chapters. Then write beat sheets for scene sequences within chapters. A beat sheet specifies dramatic action, narrative summary, and backstory references.
You need to spell out the scene sequences for the whole novel. You may want to wait to write the beat sheets as you approach each chapter, but you should write all the chapter summaries before you begin writing.
Develop this guide tidily. It is your outline, a condensed version of the novel. If you have thought through all of the action of the plot, in steps, you will be able to focus on the writing itself. You will be immersed in the dream you have created.
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IF YOU HAVE done all the exercises up to this point, this will be mostly a matter of reviewing your work and pulling it together, then typing it up and printing it out.
Within each movement, there are sets of scenes that make up an arc of the plot. Write a brief summary of what each sequence accomplishes for the story. Then write a very brief caption of each scene (titles or sentences). Group these captions into sets for the sequences. Note that you are looking at the dramatic elements of the story at this point. This makes up a beat sheet (record of steps) in your scene sequence.
If a scene sequence includes substantial narrative summary (a bridge between scenes that is compressed), note it as part of the beat sheet with the notation NS (narrative summary). Likewise, if there is significant backstory (not included within a scene), note it, too, on your beat sheet, as BS (backstory). Backstory should also be captioned or titled. Ultimately, all of the major components of your chapters should be identified.
When you are ready to write, you will need to have this close look at the pieces of the story, but you will also need the more global view of the story proceeding chapter by chapter. So now organize your sequence summaries into chapters, and write a brief summary of each chapter. Now write taglines for each chapter. Post the taglines where you can look at them as you write.
Read your taglines straight through. This is an overview of your novel. Read your chapter summaries straight through. This is your story. You have made tremendous progress not only in identifying and understanding your story, but in organizing its parts. When you do the actual writing in revising, you can concentrate on writing, not on making up new stuff, not on figuring out what needs to happen next, not on what the character is feeling here, not on what you need to explain.
Now, with your outline at hand:
Review the passages, scenes, and chapters from the first draft that you will use in the revision. Annotate for needed adjustments. Insert notes for new scenes and chapters. You should now have a “bundle” of the loose pages, arranged in chunks of chapters, perhaps with different colors of paper. You also have a lot of notes on the backs of pages in your bound copy.
Spell out your strategy for tackling the revision. Establish a calendar and schedule. Plan for breaks and rewards. Figure out how you are going to transfer notes from the bound copy and from the index card sequences you created to your loose pages. I would definitely use a different color of paper, transfer notes neatly, attach them where they are relevant. Or you can transfer notes as you come to each chapter. Keep your outline (from step 2 above) separate. If you can post it some way, all the better. Have some kind of system that tracks what you haven’t picked up yet, what you are working on, and what you have processed. Piles get shuffled.
You are going to have to fiddle with what you have produced and organize it in a way that makes sense to you. I’ve given you a start but there are so many variables, book to book and person to person. I just know planning involves a lot of paper and colors and cards, and not just your laptop at the coffee shop. Once you start revising, however, you can pick up a chapter at a time.
I do know that Anne Lamott had it right when she admonished the writer to proceed “bird by bird,” as her father had once advised her younger brother while he was undertaking a daunting school report about birds. You can’t do everything at once. And you can’t shrivel with fear thinking about the challenges ahead. You have to do the task in front of you, and then the next one. You’ll get there by sheer doggedness. Perseverance is the best friend of talent.
Rewrite the first chapter. Let’s assume for a moment that you are perfectly happy with your first chapter. I would still type it out again. Who knows what little gifts of phrases or insights may fly in? And if indeed it’s perfect, and you type it with a little bit of annoyance and a larger bit of satisfaction, you are entering your revision from your strength.
And if you need to write a new chapter, you have so much to build on now. You know what the story will be and how you will tell it. This is you turning on the lights.
Have you established a tone for your book, something that distinguishes your voice and the feeling of the novel? (Read lots of openings!!) What promises have you made the reader? That this story will be light and fun? That it will be deeply emotional and concerned with important themes? That it will transport the reader to an unusual time and place?
Write new chapters nested in the sequence of the manuscript. You must follow your own instincts here.
I’m inclined to say, review your core scenes first, not even necessarily the whole chapters. You should have them in mind clearly. Then I’d see what your notes tell you about making changes, and keep moving forward from now on. You’ll feel that you have things so chopped up that it worries you—Can I keep track of all this? So following your outline, your scene sequences, and your piles of pages and notes is a logical way to proceed. Solve the problem in front of you. If it means yet another slight change in something later, you’ll know it when you get to it. And all along, you want the feeling of following the story, not jumping around.
What I want to think is that you will move with a steady pace, not rushing, but not suffering, either. You know your story. Tell it.
Write your revised draft steadily, confidently, alternating preparation and review with your writing and rewriting.
Four: The Polish
Now confident in your story, structure, and strategy, edit for economy, focus, and grace
This is the time when I would go through the manuscript again, looking for and touching up motifs. You will already have them in your manuscript; this is a refinement step. The first step is to thumb through your pages specifically looking for images that recur, perhaps to your surprise. In Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, there are powerful recurring images of pain and blood, lies and betrayal, mothers and daughters. See what has arisen from your story, and be sure you have exploited it, if it supports your themes. Think of the heat, light, and aridity in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. Look for the ways you have established a sense of place, and see if something from early in the book could reappear later, and mean more because of the accrual of events. Reread the section “Describe the world of the novel,” in “Stage One: A Close Look,” and decide if you’ve done so to your satisfaction.
Comb your story for places where you tried to engage the reader’s senses viscerally, calling up smells or sounds, for example. Assess whether you have effectively used specific details. You’ll want to attend to this in the scenes that carry a lot of weight. Smaller scenes, transition scenes, abbreviations of action, and so on, don’t need this kind of close brushwork. But sometimes the light on a polished table or the smell of decaying roses can enhance emotional effects because they reflect the essence of what is happening.
Open your manuscript at random four or five times and read a couple of pages. Ask yourself: Do these scenes reflect time and place? Yo
u don’t want your novel to feel generic, a story that could happen in Texas as easily as in Rhode Island, in winter as well as in spring. What is the mood of this scene? Oh yeah? What words and phrases make it so?
Consider the pace of your novel. Choose a scene that is meant to move right along—things happen, something changes. Does it? How so? Is the dialogue crisp? Are sentences shorter than in other chapters? Do incidents clang against one another? Or could you trim, compress, and accelerate the action? Perhaps eliminate unneeded description. If, for example, events have spiraled to a point of reversal or revelation, and your character is socked in the gut and can go no further, does the pace reflect his emotional state? Does he think about what has happened? Does the reader have a chance to feel?
Review your core scenes yet again. Is there energy in them that pulls you into the action? Are there places where you can sink into the heart of the protagonist, feel what she is feeling, ache for her?
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PAGE THROUGH THE book and write captions of five “caught moments” that could be photographs. What is it about those moments that is captivating? Beautiful? Ugly? Provocative? Does the passage truly convey what you see in the characters at that moment? Readers should have a few strong memories from the book. Images. Feelings. Something a character said. A moment of tension, surprise, or joy. Can you make them more memorable? Imagine yourself drawing a box around “that moment.” How do your words accomplish this? Here, dear reader, remember this.
Ask yourself: If I were the reader talking to a friend, how would I finish this sentence: “I’ll never forget . . .”
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