Revision and Writing Tips

Okay, this is a long blog post. I'm sorry about that, but it's long overdue. Use this class period to read and consider these revision and writing tips.

WHY IS THIS POST HERE? Many students (from your portfolio reflections) have been wondering or bothered about revision. How does one revise? What should one revise? How can I make my writing stronger and more artistic? Well, there are answers here if you care enough to read them.

When revising:

• Consider changing the form (would this piece work better as a poem, play, or an essay?)
• Consider changing the protagonist (does your character change? Is your protagonist interesting and involved in the plot?)
• Consider theme, setting, and detail that is often left out of a first draft
• Consider the arrangement of your plot. Is your story too predictable? Too obvious? You may wish to arrange your story as a circular plot or pattern or as a flashback as opposed to linear.
• Revise and craft sentence or structure of your writing to be more effective
• Remove characters that do not add or progress your story
• Remove scenes that do not progress the story or plot or characterization or theme, etc.
• Remove words that are vague, redundant, or unnecessary
• Add or remove dialogue (add or remove scenes). If the character has nothing important to say, move on with the description or end the scene. It is pointless to carry on a conversation that doesn't add anything to the story.
• Add poetic and literary devices. We've taught you a variety of techniques and artistic and rhetorical tools. Please use them. Here's a list to help you. Look at the side bar as well for fiction and drama devices.

Advice about Beginnings:

A beginning promises more to come. It should hook our attention, allow us entrance into the world of the story. Beginnings need to be full of potential for the characters (and the reader). Some simple ways writers do this is the following (taken from The Fiction Writer's Workshop by Josip Novakovich)

Setting: setting sets the stage and raises our expectations, introduces us to location, time, and supports character, tone, mood and POV.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half-way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.

Ideas: While this can sometimes be dry or essay-like, it can also characterize a speaker, a place, an important motif or tone of a story.

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them…”

Imagistic or Strong Sensations: Imagery invites your reader to experience your narrative, giving you a good start. It also helps establish setting, usually.

1956. The air-conditioned darkness of the Avenue Theater smells of flowery pomade, sugary chocolates, cigarette smoke, and sweat.

A Need or Motive: Need is essential for all major characters. It is usually what drives the
conflict and characterization, also the plot in a story. Starting off with a motive or need is
the fastest way to learn what characters want.

On his way to the station William remembered with a fresh pang of disappointment that he was taking nothing down to the kiddies. Their first words always were as they ran to greet him, “What have you got for me, daddy?” and he had nothing.

Action: Action catches our attention.

The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him.

Scene: Usually in one sentence, combines action, setting, and character.

Card-playing was going on in the quarters of Narumov, an officer in the Guards.

Symbolic Object: Describe an object that has significance to your story, characters, plot. Usually a reader will recognize the importance of an object if mentioned in the first paragraph of a story.

An antique sleigh stood in the yard, snow after snow banked up against its eroded runners.

Sex: Sex sells. It also gets our attention.

After I became a prostitute, I had to deal with penises of every imaginable shape and size.

Character portrait: Introduces a reader to your protagonist or an important character.

The girl’s scalp looked as though it had been singed by fire—strands of thatchy red hair snaked away from her face, then settled against her skin, pasted there by sweat and sunscreen and the blown grit and dust of travel.

Character’s Thoughts: Like a portrait, this one’s internal.

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Question: A direct way to motivate the reader, who often wants to know the answer to a posed question.

“Well, Peter, any sign of them yet?”

Prediction: Creating an ominous tone, a prediction foreshadows or hints at the ultimate ending of a story.

Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.

Anecdote: an anecdote (a short story) can introduce an important idea or theme, create a symbol, or set a particular tone.

The village of Ukleyevo lay in the ravine, so that only the belfry and the chimneys of the cotton mills could be seen from the highway and the railroad station. When passers-by would ask what village it was, they were told: “that’s the one where the sexton ate up all the caviar at the funeral.”

Wading into the Middle:

After the Beginning: now what?

You began typing the moment you had an idea. You started off strong. Now three sentences in, or three paragraphs, or even three pages, you've reached your first stumbling block: what happens next?

With prompts and experience, most writers can get started. What's difficult is continuing through a murky middle. Here are some tips to slog through the worst part of your writing experience:

1. Most of the time we get stuck when we don't know what our characters want. Give your character a motive (a desire, or goal, etc.) to keep him/her moving forward.
2. Forward march: Move the plot forward by adding conflict and action. Involve your characters in a specific action or direct conflict with another character. This is particularly helpful if you are bored.
3. Put yourself in your protagonist's shoes: go inside a character's head. This is a common error that young writers constantly forget to do. Get your character's perspective. What would you think in a similar situation? What would you see if you were in this scene? What would you notice? What would you say? What would you do?
4. Skip forward in time. No one said this story has to be chronological. Advance the time period and move forward with the plot. Skip a line to indicate you've changed time (either forward or backward).
5. Skip to another setting/location. Move your character to a new setting. What happens there? Describe the setting/location, and the actions of minor characters. Skip a line to indicate change of setting.
6. Skip to a scene happening at the same time, but in a different location. Skip a line to indicate a change of setting.
7. Skip to a different protagonist or the perspective of a new character. Skip a line to indicate a change of POV.
8. Press forward: If you need more time to research details and don't want to stop to look up a fact or information, indicate what you need to look up by BOLDING or CAPITALIZING a note to yourself. You can also insert NOTES using your word processor feature under the insert menu.
9. Skip to the next major plot point. If you know where the story is going, but don't know yet how to get there, skip a line and write the next scene.
10. Go back to brainstorming. Use your journal to try out some new things. If you don't know (or are stuck on):

• Your characters: write a character sketch, draw a picture of your character, or develop your character's background history
• Your setting: draw your setting, find a picture of an appropriate setting on the internet, describe your setting using imagery--what sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and sights would one experience in the setting
• Your plot: list possible challenges or problems that a character might face in a similar situation or setting. Decisions characters make (or don't make) often create conflict. Create a mind map or use a graphic organizer to focus on plot elements.
• Your theme: create a premise for your story. What do you want to communicate about the human condition? What lesson or experience are you trying to relate?

How do I write an ending? Often young writers use the same kind of summary ending over and over again until they are so bored that they decide never to write another story again. You have some choices here. Take a look!

Endings can be:

Circular: The beginning and the end reflect upon one another, often using the same situation, setting, characterization, or even repeating the same line or idea presented in the opening. This provides a sense of parallelism in your story structure. It is best used when suggesting that the past and future of a character/story is similar.

Matching vs. Nonmatching: similar to a circular ending, the first image is transformed, and is repeated at the end. This is most like the pattern in music: theme and variation. The first image of the story foreshadows or suggests the last image. Sometimes this is obvious, othertimes the image is subtle.

Surprise ending: Often an ironic ending, or an ending that surprises the reader. The American writer O.Henry was a master of this kind of ending. It is often found in horror/suspense or mystery fiction. The "surprise" needs to be planned by the writer, who should include details that prepare the reader for the surprise, instead of "shocking" the reader, who usually resents this strategy.

Summary ending: A summary of the outcome of the story – this kind of story wraps the plot up very tightly, suggesting the future for the characters. No loose ends. This sort of ending has fallen out of favor lately, so use it at your own peril. I'd suggest to do away with this kind of ending. If you use it for your story, consider using one of the other options posted here instead.

Open ending: used largely in contemporary fiction, the story doesn’t end nice and neatly (like the summary ending). Instead, it leaves an important question posed to the reader, so that the reader must interpret the ending. Caution: this can sometimes confuse a reader. It is best used for subtle effect.

Ending with an image/idea: ending a story with an important detailed image or idea that reflects the theme of the story can "stain" the idea or image in the mind of the reader.

“The best guide on how to write short stories is to read those already published by any good author, and the best way to discover your own talent, if you have any, is not to talk about the stories you find swimming about in your head, but to write them down, and keep on writing them…the only way to find out if you are a writer or not is to write.”

Types of Short Stories: Know what you're attempting to write.

The Traditional Story: The goal of the traditional story is to tell a simple story. Usually unsophisticated or simple, the author usually draws experience from his/her own life or similar experience. Traditional stories may use any genre (sci-fi, fantasy, western, romance, realism, action-adventure, horror, suspense, etc.) but, again, the focus of the story is on telling a simple story, usually to entertain. Usually the story is written in a realistic style.

The subjective story: The author has found his/her voice. The author discovers that his own personality can play a large part in a story. Usually these stories use first person POV and gets into the mind of its protagonist. The focus then of the subjective story is development of character. The story can be written in a realistic style, but may also begin to move toward a more complex subjective narration.

The objective story: The author is able to suppress his/her own feeling and view of things for the sake of a more objective presentation of his/her story and characters. The author’s personality or life is not found consciously in the story.

Experimental and symbolic story: These stories fool around with the structure of fiction. They are often experimental or symbolic, pushing the boundaries of what “fiction” is. These stories are often less obvious, more subtle in their meaning, characters, plot, etc. These forms play around with fiction convention, they often break the “4th wall”, may use multiple subjective narration, tell a story backwards, break fiction convention rules, etc.

Complex story: The author utilizes techniques from the first four groups here: (traditional, subjective, objective, experimental), combining the best techniques from all these forms.

Universal story: The skilled author hits upon certain human truths. The universal story form is similar to the complex story, except that it transcends the form to become “classic” short fiction. The universal story is often found in novel; many authors at this stage find novels more to their liking.

Pick a tense and stick with it for a reason:

In the English language there are three tenses that a writer can use, and these tenses have distinct benefits and drawbacks.

The three tenses we use are:

• 1. Past
• 2. Present
• 3. Future

You may notice that tense all seems to rely on the concept of TIME. The normal default for a story (because it IS a story) is to use the past tense. This means the writer can cover the general past (that which has happened before the present moment), the immediate past (that which has just happened), or the distant past (what occurred when the character was years or centuries younger).

Past tense allows the writer to:

1. Create characterization by giving a character time to REFLECT on an event.
2. Create a CONTRAST between what has happened in the past and what events are likely to occur again in the present. This might allow for a writer to use an open ending or surprise ending effectively because previous events create a pattern, for example.
3. Use past tense when the EVENTS of the story and the choices a character makes are important.
4. It is awkward to have your 1st person narrator die in past tense.

HOW TO WRITE IN PAST TENSE: Use the past tense of the verbs in your story/narrative. You have to learn these to avoid making simple mistakes in tense.

Present tense is often used in contemporary poetry as well as fiction. It allows the writer to:

1. Express action occurring in the present. Present tense highlights and stresses the current moment.
2. To examine a character's current state of being
3. To suggest occurrences or actions that will carry on in the future
4. To examine an action that started in the past and continues into the present.
5. Use present tense when you want immediacy.
6. To describe both habits and routines and general facts
7. To describe unchanging states of being
8. To indicate events in the near future
9. To provide narratives as instruction
10. Allows the writer to use the historical present for stylistic effects

Future tense is usually not used in fiction, but crops up occasionally in experimental works. Use future tense to:

1. Write about what is about to happen
2. Examine uncertain or varying distances or events ahead in time
3. Allows the narrator to use probability or intent
4. Allows for predictions or imminence of actions (that which is likely to happen)

Some key phrases to note you are in the future:
I shall, I will, I may, I might, I must, I should, I'm about to, etc.

CLASS WORK: You're in the lab. Use this time to work on revising your previous drafts. Youtube will be available to you after school. Avoid wasting the time you could be working on your writing. If you are serious about writing: write. If you couldn't care less...then there's not much I can do for you. Hope you have a good life. No one expects you to be a writer (or cares whether you are a writer or not). If you care about being a writer, you will write. If you care about improving your skills, take some of this advice to heart.

HOMEWORK: Take something you've written today and continue to work on it. Revise as much as you think is necessary. Save your writing and work on other pieces when you become frustrated. Pull out your writing every so often (year after year) and read or work on it again.