Hints for Revision

Welcome back, everyone. I've had a lot of conferences and conventions over the last month and feel like I've been neglecting all five of you who faithfully read this space. I'm sorry. I'll try to let less time pass between each post.

Though I must admit, November will probably be light, too, as I'll be cranking on a book for National Novel Writing Month. I haven't been working on drafting a new novel in a few months. I did take a break and wrote a feature-length screenplay in the time between this post and my last.

But I've been doing a lot of revision lately. Like, a lot. I got into this cycle of just writing novels and then writing the next one. And then the next one. I literally have 11 manuscripts I'm sitting on. And I'm in the midst of editing my fifth one in this cycle. It's slow going work. I feel like it takes me longer to revise a book than write it. It's more thoughtful work. And it's more discerning. You're rewriting things from sentences all the way up to whole pages.

My philosophy is always to pack more story and detail into fewer words. It can be hard. But not insurmountable.

One of the conferences I did was the League of Utah Writer's Fall Conference. I did a really fun presentation there (that you can listen to on my Patreon) about how studying movies can make you a better writer.

I attended quite a few panels, too. One of the presentations I enjoyed the most was with Angie Hodapp, an agent at the Nelson Literary Agency. It was about great description, but she laid out a few strategies that I've been incorporating into my revisions that are worth repeating. I mean, the whole presentation was worth repeating, but this was what I found most helpful in my revision process. It's stuff I know, but it was a real kick in the pants to see it laid out like this and have a really smart person present it to you like Angie did.

First?

Punch up your verbs to avoid passive voice

This is one I struggle with a bunch in my first draft, but it's so easy to spot later on. Take this sentence for example.

The fish was caught by the shark.

This is super passive. How could you make this take up less space and say the same thing? It's all in how you use the verb and make it work more for its place in the sentence. Was is a good word to look out for. Delete it and fiddle with the verb and reorder the subject if you need to to make it work.

The shark caught the fish. 

The shark swallowed the fish. 

These are very basic examples, but I think you get the picture.

Do a search in your document for "with" and "ing."


This is another one that makes a lot of sense. In Angie's presentation, she offered two example sentences and asked everyone to rewrite them. Here they are, unchanged, and we'll take a few different cracks at them below.

He was tall and dark with a rugged face, and he had a dazzling white smile.

The piano was sitting in the corner of the room with a layer of dust and spider webs covering it.

So, how can we fix these so they're tighter and do more with less? Here are a few of my attempts at both sentences.

His bright, wide smile was a contrast to his tall dark features and rugged face. 

That's reasonable, but it doesn't really sing. Is this a little too "telling" instead of showing? Maybe we do need more words.

A full head taller than everyone else in the room, his rugged face and dark complexion stood as a contrast to his dazzling, white smile. 

Or:

From his height, he could look down on everyone, and if he wasn't smiling so widely, I'd have mistaken his grim, rugged face and dark features for trouble.

Here's the next sentence:

A layer of dust and the fine glisten of spider webs covered the piano in the corner. 

But, again, how do we make this a little creepier?

Spiders crawled across their glistening webs strung across the dusty piano in the corner of the room.

Or:

A layer of dust and the fine glisten of spider webs coated the old piano resting in the corner. 

Regardless of how we rework the sentences, the originals are problematic. Searching for "with" and "ing" in your document will help you highlight these cases and help give them special attention. That's not to say every use of "with" and "ing" are wrong, but it's not a bad thing to look out for them. In most cases, you can improve.

Do a search in your document for Have/Has/Had

Again, more passive voice work here.

Have, has, and had all imply a passive use of the word. Again, not every instance of them is wrong, but this is another great way to search your document and find places where you can punch up the prose.

Here's an example:

The long dark passageway had stone walls that were overgrown with moss and vines.

But what if we got rid of the the "had" and the "with?" Does the sentence work better this way:

Moss and vines covered the stone walls of the long dark passageway.

But, again. Is that too straightforward? What if we tried this:

A tangle of vines and moss gripped the stone of the long hallway, disappearing in the distance with the light.

Or:

Moss and vines clutched the walls of the stone passageway, disappearing into dark infinity where the light couldn't reach.

I don't necessarily think these are the right answers, per se, but they're definitely better than the original sentence.

These are just a taste of the work I'm doing on my revisions. And it seems like it's a lot harder to do it with your own words in the context of your story than it is in isolated incidents like this. Because you're paying attention to a lot more, too. For one, you're looking at how the individual sentence works in the paragraph, how the the pacing might be affected, what lyrical quality does the writing contain elsewhere on the page, etc.

Revising is hard. But maybe this sort of thing can help.

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