Part 17 (1/2)
Before you begin, I want to caution you not to disimprove what is there. If in doubt about a change, don't make the change. Instead, make a note to yourself for later consideration. I find that when I look at such notes days or weeks later, many of those questionable ideas for revision get discarded.
Your first objective in a general revision is to tighten the ma.n.u.script. I know of only one novelist who writes tight first drafts that need expanding in revision. The others need cutting, lots of it. It is perfectly normal to overwrite in first drafts. The test of a writer's skill is in recognizing on later reading what can be eliminated, and then having the guts to do the cutting.
One of the students in my advanced fiction seminar had a ma.n.u.script acceptable to his agent but not to him. He knew it was too long. He took advantage of his computer. Every time he came to a paragraph he wasn't sure contributed to the book, he marked it and with a block move transferred it to the end, after the last page. When he finished he found that he had transferred dozens of paragraphs and that only one or two, in modified form, deserved a place in the text. It's a useful strategy. I've tried it and it works.
Your second objective is to watch out for the between-the-scenes material, especially the offstage recounting of actions not seen. Try to eliminate as many of these as you can, or make them active and interesting in themselves. If this needs clarification, reread Chapter 3.
If you're not used to extensive revision, you may feel as if you're trying to do too many things at once. I want to a.s.sure you that over time you will be able to do it. In the meantime, do as many as you can and then go back over the ma.n.u.script for the others. Remember, I am trying to keep you from growing ”cold” by keeping down the number of your reviews of your work.
In your general revision, cut words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs, pages, or whole scenes that seem not absolutely necessary. Watch for places where your own attention flags. That's usually a sign that something needs to be revised or cut.
If your sentences are all approximately the same length, the effect will be monotonous. Vary the length of sentences. Ideally, follow an especially long sentence with a short, even abrupt sentence. Don't do this all the time. A pattern of short-long-short-long can get almost as monotonous as all long or all short sentences. One of my students writes naturally in a mellifluous cadence. It's her greatest fault. An unbroken mellifluous cadence, lovely for a few sentences, if kept up will put a reader to sleep.
Unless you are consciously trying to slow things down between fast-moving scenes, be relentless in moving the story forward. If you find it bogging down at any point, it could be for many reasons: perhaps too slow a pace, not enough happening. If you don't see an immediate fix, mark the place in the margin and write down what you think might be wrong. Come back to those places later.
If you catch the author talking at any point, or a mix of points of view, mark the section so that you can return to Chapter 13 for guidance.
Are your characters under stress from time to time? Does the stress increase? Keep reminding yourself that fiction deals with the most stressful moments of the characters' lives.
As you go through, cut every unessential adjective and adverb. Cut ”very.” Cut ”poor” for everything but poverty. Make every word count.
If you've said the same thing twice in different words, pick the better one and cut the other. If you find yourself using the same uncommon word twice within a few pages, use your thesaurus to pick a synonym. And in your read-through, mark every cliche for excision.
One of the most common improvements I find in line-editing a writer's ma.n.u.script is changing the order of words, phrases, or independent clauses in a sentence. The simplest instance is where you put the identification of who is speaking. Do you write, George said, ”They treating you okay?”
Or: ”They treating you okay?” George said.
If there is any chance that the reader won't know who is speaking at that point, the ”George said” should come first. If it is clear who is speaking, ”George said” can follow what he says or be omitted.
In my own work, I make transpositions hundreds of times in a book-length ma.n.u.script. Sometimes it is to let the emphasis of a sentence fall in a different place. Here's an unedited sentence: Josephine j.a.phet of course knew why her son was a reader in a universe of listeners to rock music.
That puts the emphasis on rock music. I transposed the phrase ”her son was a reader” to the end of the sentence, since that was where I wanted the emphasis to fall: Josephine j.a.phet of course knew why, in a universe of listeners to rock music, her son was a reader.
In another scene, Ed j.a.phet is in school, outside the room where his father has just finished teaching and is trying to get away from a student pestering him with questions after cla.s.s. Ed shows his impatience this way: Your old man teaching in your school was bad enough. Depending on him for a ride home was the pits. Come on, Dad, move it.
The thought was improved by transposing the last of the three sentences to the beginning of the paragraph, so that it read: Come on, Dad, move it. Your old man teaching in your school was bad enough. Depending on him for a ride home was the pits.
After a fight, a boy is lying in the snow, badly hurt. See if you can spot the glitch in this sentence: The other cop slid out of the car, knelt beside Urek, fingers feeling for a pulse in the neck.
Because readers will undoubtedly have had experience with a pulse being taken at the wrist, they may suppose that immediately on reading the word ”pulse.” Immediately, they read ”in the neck” and have to change their first view. That kind of glitch can momentarily disturb the reading experience. To avoid it, I simply transposed a few words: The other cop slid out of the car, knelt beside Urek, fingers feeling the neck for a pulse.
It pays to transpose sentences for clarity. In the following example, a woman who is not always articulate, on the phone to a lawyer expresses her concern about what will happen to her if her husband is convicted: ”If Paul goes to jail, I won't have anywhere. I can't pay the mortgage on my own. He listens to you. Please come over.”
In my opinion, the phrase ”I won't have anywhere” is not immediately comprehensible in its present location. Transposed, it works well: ”If Paul goes to jail, I can't pay the mortgage on my own. I won't have anywhere. He listens to you. Please come over.”
”Purple prose” means writing that is overblown. It turns off editors and readers almost immediately. Here are some dreadful examples of purple prose: The cry of a soul in torment, swept by a tide of anger and outrage. Terror plucked at her taut nerves. Jagged laughter tore at her throat.
Ghastly red spatterings, viscous red-streaked gobbets of his brains. Fierce rending triumph.
Enough? n.o.body writes that way? These are all from the bestseller Scarlett, Alexandra Ripley's sequel to Gone With the Wind.
A phrase need not be ”purple” or ”flowery” to be conspicuous, by which I mean that every time you pa.s.s it, it jumps off the page and pleases you. When you ”love” certain images or sentences, they are frequently so conspicuous as to interfere with the story. If they are, save them in a special box that you'll look into five years from now, and thank me for having asked you to remove them from your ma.n.u.script, though it may have hurt at the time.
Root out sentimentality, which is an excess of response to a stimulus. It makes writing ”flowery.” Your job is to stimulate emotions in the reader. An excessive response turns off the reader, just as it does people in life: ”Why Fred, I am so excited to see you I just can't bear it.”
That kind of gus.h.i.+ng is just as incredible in fiction as it is in life. Underplay to evoke emotion in the reader: I looked at her eyes. They were dry.
Given the right context, that would evoke more emotion than something overblown like ”She was ready to cry her heart out.”
As you read through, look for imprecision, when the word you used is not exactly the word you needed. Consult a dictionary. Consult a thesaurus.
Until you are in the habit of making sure that there is something visual on every page, while reviewing the draft put a small V in the lower right corner of every page that has something visual on it. This provides a discipline as you develop the experience of reading with an editor's eye. If a page has nothing visual, mark NV and return to it later to introduce a visual element. If you have two or more consecutive pages with nothing visual, you may have a larger problem that needs remedying, perhaps too much narrative summary where an immediate scene is needed.
In dialogue sequences, if your characters usually speak in complete sentences, fix it so they don't. Have you used enough dialogue? Remember that one of the virtues of dialogue is that it makes scenes visible. If your dialogue sufficiently confrontational? If any dialogue runs longer than three sentences, break it up with an interjection from another character or a thought or action. Check to see that responses in dialogue are oblique, at least from time to time. If any exchange of dialogue seems weak or wrong in comparison to other dialogue exchanges, mark it for later improvement or excision.
In your general revision, catch the places where a character ”muttered,” ”screamed,” and the like instead of ”said.” Subst.i.tute ”he said” and ”she said” for language that tells the reader how the lines are spoken. That's the dialogue's job.
Can you now see why I suggested you perform triage on major matters before your general read-through? If you are new to the process, you'll want to make a checklist of all the things I've suggested catching during general revision. If you find that you just can't do everything in one pa.s.s, save some things for a second pa.s.s later on. In time, if you do a good job of triage, you'll be able to handle most remaining matters in one reading.
Does that mean you're finished? You are never finished rewriting until you receive galley proofs. You will still make essential revisions, but professionals try to do all the revising they can before the book is set in type (the cost of ”author's alterations” beyond a minimum is borne by the author). When you've completed triage and then a general revision, you still have work to do. You may want to ask yourself, if you were to bring a strong scene forward, would that provoke the reader's curiosity more than the scene that presently starts the book? Having revised the ma.n.u.script, all of it will be fresh in your mind, which will make it easier to identify a strong, curiosity-arousing scene that might be brought forward.
You might consider at this stage whether the ending of your book is a high point of satisfaction for the reader. If not, is there another scene or circ.u.mstance that might make a better ending?
After finis.h.i.+ng your revision, let the ma.n.u.script lie fallow for several days or longer. Don't rush to show it to a friend or family member. Let it cool down. Go on with other work, then come back to the ma.n.u.script and read it with your changes. As you become more expert at revision, you will be a better judge of your work than laymen who love you and don't know anything about craft.
For your next read-through, work with a clean ma.n.u.script in which the changes you've made are not visible as changes. (One of the great advantages of working on a computer!) This time, as you read, watch for anything that momentarily makes you see words on the page and takes you out of experiencing the story. You are aiming for the reader's total immersion. You should be able to spot these flaws after you have made the kind of changes I've suggested.
If all this checking seems excessive, ask yourself would you fly in a plane in which the experienced pilot felt so c.o.c.ksure that he didn't actually perform the checklist that makes flying safer for all of us?
If you're of a mind to ask, ”Stein, do you do all this revision yourself?” I'll report that The Best Revenge, a novel of mine I've quoted many times in this book, was turned in to my publisher in its eleventh draft. It was accepted without a single change. Then, on my own recognizance, I did two more drafts.
How many times in the course of a lifetime do we wish we could relive some conversation or event, do it differently? Revision provides that opportunity. First drafts of nonfiction can be flawed in organization, quality control, interest, and language. Lucky for us writers, this is the one place in life where we get a reprieve.
Perhaps if we did get a second chance in life, we'd blunder right back in and muck things up again. That's what can happen in revision unless we have a plan of action. I will attempt to provide a plan here.
Att.i.tude is important. If you review what you've written and exclaim, ”Oh my G.o.d, this is awful!” you'll only dispirit yourself. The experienced writer knows his first draft will be flawed, that he will get a chance to employ his editorial skills in fixing it. During my decades of editing, I met only one professional writer who believed that his first drafts were graced with perfection. And who is to argue with a man's religion, as long as he takes his ma.n.u.script somewhere else?
Just as in revising fiction, the nonfiction writer is in danger of growing cold on his ma.n.u.script quickly if he starts revising at the top of page one and goes through paragraph by paragraph to the end. To avoid growing cold, I advocate fixing major things before starting on a page-by-page, front-to-back revision. This will confer two advantages. If you fix the larger problems first, you will in all likelihood make some first-draft infelicities in the new material that you will then catch on your subsequent page-by-page revision. In addition, by working on specific problems, you will not have grown cold on the ma.n.u.script when you tackle the read-through.
A good way to begin is to personify your subject matter in an incident involving an individual. Sometimes the germ of such an anecdote is buried elsewhere in the draft. If so, examine it to see if it has the potential of being made stronger than your present opening.
Also ask yourself if your opening is sufficiently visual to be seen by the reader. You may recall that in Chapter 3, ”Welcome to the Twentieth Century,” I explained the differences among the three main components of fiction-description, narrative summary, and immediate scene-and pointed out that understanding the differences could be of immediate help to a nonfiction writer also. Most important, the nonfiction writer who learns to use immediate scenes wherever he can will also find a dramatic improvement in the readability of his work. The ideal place for your first immediate scene is on page one.
Before you settle on a beginning, ask yourself if it provokes sufficient curiosity in the reader. How soon after your beginning will the reader comes upon the ”engine” of your article or book, the place at which the reader decides not to stop reading?
If you are writing an article, does it make one point after another on a plateau, or does it build toward a climax? If it is a book, does the end of most chapters point toward the next?
Have you summarized material that would make interesting visual pa.s.sages if you converted the summaries to events the reader could see? If there are summaries you cannot or don't want to convert to scenes, can you shorten them in order to avoid losing the reader's attention? If you want to ”jump-cut,” the reader will go along with you.
Have you created occasional suspenseful interest by raising a question and withholding the answer for a while? Can you recall any place where this might be done now?