Where to Begin: Gaining Perspective, Setting Goals, and Finding the Heart (Revision Pt. 2)

Aside from the fact that writers would much rather write than rewrite (caused in part by the previously-discussed logical fallacies that the first draft (A) is already the best version of the book you can write and (B) that your first draft might not actually need revising)—I think one of the biggest challenges in any creative endeavor is getting started. Many artists have described the terror of the empty page or the blank canvas; worse, I think, is staring at the half-done project, unsure of how to get it across the finish line.

It's a common adage that you should “get some distance” from a draft. You might be told to “put it in a drawer” or “forget about it for a while” so that you can return to your manuscript with fresh eyes. All of this is about giving yourself the invaluable opportunity to see it again, and to hopefully see it for its promise as well as its flaws.

But how exactly do you create distance?

Time is the most important factor. You need enough time to forget some of the work that went into your draft—time to be surprised by your own turns of phrase or the specific way a plot point unfolds. You need time to watch and read and experience things that aren’t your novel—time to recognize that this version of what you created, while awesome, is only a first step. You also need time to get excited about getting back into the work.

I struggled with this “forget it” advice as a writer. Perhaps it’s the way my brain works, but it would take a lot longer than I’m willing to wait in order to actually forget the draft. So, instead, I focused on a different metric for gaining perspective: I waited until I was sure that I was ready to say goodbye to the draft I’d already written and start on a new one, though that was a pretty daunting prospect. Perhaps you’re the kind of writer who can really forget their work—but I found my strategy, which was less about forgetting and more about gaining a new perspective and a new appreciation for what my draft was and wasn’t, to be a good alternative.

The truth is, when I returned to my current novel after only a few weeks of setting it aside, I already had some ideas about what I wanted to improve. I’d been working on the draft for more than three years—part of it reworked and reworked as part of an MFA thesis, parts of it less fully formed. But I knew that it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I envisioned the kind of tightly woven, exciting, gutting story that I liked to read—and if I was honest with myself, my book wasn’t there yet.

And this, I think, is a good place to start: goals.

Setting goals can be an elusive thing for a writer, but most of them look like: Write 2,000 words by Friday. Write five days a week. Finish the chapter. Finish the novel. They may have dates assigned to them, or they may not. As the primary caregiver for two kids, deadlines are as slippery as fish in my world—slippery enough I usually avoid them entirely.

But goals for revision?

In addition to feeling like I wanted my book to be vaguely better, I knew only one specific thing. My novel was WAY too long.

WAY WAY WAY too long.

If I had any hopes of anyone ever wanting to read it, I’d need to cut the length by at least 25%, preferably more.

This was my first goal: Cut the length to something approximating saleable.

(Don’t worry, I’ll give you the ugly specifics of this battle in a later post, even though it is humiliating to do it. I credit Matt Bell with the courage—he told us how many instances of “that” he cut from his draft. I’ll follow suit by giving you some horrifying editing details from my current journey.)

As I sat with the idea of revising, there were a few other things I knew needed to be changed—certain chapters that weren’t working the way I wanted them to, certain plot elements that felt shaky at best.

I think this is as good a place to start as any. Start making a list of things you want to accomplish in your revision. Leave room on your list, because in our next step, we’ll be generating even more of a punch list—but start now with what you know you want to change. My early revision list on my current project looked something like this:

·         Cut a bajillion words

·         Fix (Character X)’s voice

·         Rework chapters 10-14 (pacing, interiority, etc.)

·         Figure out a way to enhance (X) element of worldbuilding because it’s unclear

This felt like enough of a list to get started, so I cracked open the document at the beginning, and set about the first real step of getting to know what I’d created: reading it.

This is an important and, I think, often-overlooked part of revision. It’s so tempting to start fixing right away, but the trouble is that if you’re anything like most writers, your novel has been put together over long stretches of time. It’s important to see what exactly it is that you’ve created without making changes.

This is where the work begins—and where you’ll start (but not finish) adding to your revision punch list.

As you read, make notes to yourself. Highlight the good and bad. Write down all the new ideas and realizations you have. Resist the urge to start tinkering. It isn’t useful yet, and it can send you into spirals of doing work that you’re only going to redo again later. Just read and remark.

While you’re reading, you should pay particular attention to the heart of your story. What is giving it life? Is it one particular plotline? Is there a theme that keeps coming up that you didn’t even notice when you were drafting? Is that something you want to feed and lean into or something you want to prune back? Are there characters that just make you fall in love with them? What is the pulse of the story? What gives it a life of its own? What elements live in your imagination when you walk away? Which parts make you excited to read your own work? Are you surprised that the heart of the story seems different from what you planned? Has the focal point shifted? Is it better for those changes?

Find the heart. Fall in love with it.

And at the same time, notice what’s hiding that heart…in a bad way. Are there too many characters muddying up the story? Are there distracting subplots or threats and ideas that don’t go anywhere? Are there places where tension flags and you get bored with your own story? Is there something in the way of falling into the world of the story?

These are the most useful observations you can make at this juncture. Try not to let the negative observations color your view of the book—and try not to let the positive ones cloud your judgement. Right now, you’re looking at the immature version of your novel. It has all the potential baked in—but it hasn’t fully achieved what it’s capable of yet.

So, my “Where to Begin” step of revision actually has three steps baked in:

1)      Try to gain perspective and distance from your draft and make room to see it with fresh eyes.

2)      Start a list of goals—but don’t start working towards them. Your list is, itself, a first draft of a revision plan.

3)      Read your book and try very hard not to start tinkering. Instead, find the heart of what you’ve created, the good and the bad. Fall in love with the potential of your novel, and see if you can imagine all its best parts and features blossoming as its faults recede. When you think you’ve got a feel for what it actually is you’ve created, it’s time to move into a more active phase of revision.

In our next post, we’ll be talking about the phase of revision that had the most profound impact on my novel—the thing that really allowed me to turn what I’d worked on into the book I really wanted it to be. We’ll talk about working in summary as a method of planning large-scale, functional revision, using it as a strategy to tighten and structurally re-engineer your book.

Resolute

ENGRAVING of the HMS RESOLUTE

When I hear that word, I either think of the desk, the one in the White House, or the ship which lent the desk both its wooden hull and its name. And this is where I’ll start my brand-spankin’-new blog, I guess, by ruminating on a failed arctic expedition, some ruin, a grand resurrection, and a legacy of reinvention. Also, arguably, by success and failure in nearly equal measure. And, oh yeah, also writing fiction. The Resolute desk, which has played host to many of modern America’s most important political moments since it moved to the Oval Office in 1961, was originally a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. From 1880 to 1961, it floated around the White House, only to be rediscovered by Jackie Kennedy during her restoration work as First Lady and put back in its proper place. That’s all fine, but not particularly interesting.

Here's the part I really do find interesting: The oak for the desk was taken from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, a barque-rigged Royal Navy ship outfitted specifically for Arctic explorations. The Resolute launched in 1850 as part of a massive effort to discover the fate of Arctic Explorer John Franklin, whose attempt to find a North West Passage in 1845 ended in silence and mystery (spoiler, he and his entire crew died in 1847).

Long story short (we’re here to talk about writing, after all, not boats…), the Resolute met a fate hardly better than Franklin’s. After a measly four years in service, unsuccessfully searching for the lost voyage, the Resolute became trapped in the arctic ice and was abandoned, left to do whatever ships do in such unfortunate circumstances.

In 1855, an American whaler from Connecticut found the vessel drifting nearly 1,200 miles from where it was last seen, and rescued it. The Resolute was purchased by the American government in 1856, cleaned up, and sailed to England as a gift for Queen Victoria. One can only imagine receiving such a bizarre gift from a foreign government, I suppose—but ever pragmatic, Victoria put the ship back into service, where it never again left home waters before it was retired and scrapped for timber in 1879.

The oak timbers were used to build, among other things, a desk. It weighed a whopping 1,300 pounds, and was sailed back to the United States, because apparently, such tokens of esteem were normal?

In other words, the Resolute had a pretty wild and relatively unsuccessful, disappointing life, and that was before it began serving as the stage for the many notable deeds and misdeeds of twenty four American presidents.

Here are my takeaways:

1)      Early failure does not preclude later success.

2)      Success, likewise, does not always look the way one expects it to.

3)      Boats and desks seem to share a capacity for resurfacing in unlikely places.

4)      If you want to make a lasting impression next Christmas, give someone a 19th century boat.

Seriously, though, I find it fascinating that a ship of middling repute as a sailing vessel found much greater notoriety as a desk. And as a desk, it hasn’t endured in the popular imagination because it’s level (true), strong (true), heavy (true), and huge (true)—in other words, it isn’t notable because it’s a good desk. It’s notable because of the things it has made people feel and the stories it has told. Fine, fine, a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. We remember the Resolute desk for things like FDR having a little door added so that his wheelchair could be hidden beneath it or John Kennedy Jr. playing in the footwell. It’s those stories that have seared themselves into the American consciousness. To say that desk has seen things is to understate the obvious (and maybe it is also to snicker with immature schoolkid glee).

I think if you’re going to make resolutions, you ought to do so knowing you can be resolute and still fail. You can be resolute and succeed in ways you didn’t plan that weren’t even part of your own goals.

This has happened to me, so I should know.

In 2022, I resolved to finish my MFA thesis novel.

I didn’t.

Instead, I finished it 2 months late. Success! Not on anyone’s timeline, of course, and as riddled with problems as I assume the Resolute was when it was found floating aimlessly in the ocean.

In 2023, I resolved to query that same (finished, ha!) novel to agents!

I didn’t!

Instead, I rewrote the manuscript twice, cutting out nearly a full third of what I’d written and completely reworking most of what I’d done before. We’ll talk more about that at a later date, I promise.

So here it is 2024, and it’s tempting to be hopelessly irresolute. Making declarations about what I’m going to do seems a bit pointless after two years of failure. But I’m finally ready to embark on the next part of this expedition, I think. My friend Tim would be pleased to see that his boat metaphor for novel drafts applies in grand fashion to this blog post; he’s already told me that it's time to see if this book is seaworthy.

Neither of us know whether it will float or sink, yet, but hey. The Resolute made better furniture than it did a sailing vessel, so maybe there’s some kind of future out there for this novel no matter what happens. Which is why I’m writing this blog—er, Captain’s Log?—to begin with.

On that note, here’s what I’m going to be up to, and very possibly failing to achieve, in 2024.

PUBLISHING:

Query that novel. I can’t control any other part of the process past that, so that’s the goal, packed with all the hopes and dreams that go along with trying to launch a successful career.

WRITING:

Finish the next book. There’s a fair amount of distance to cover before I’m done. I’m hoping some of the lessons I learned in revising this year (see the post I’m writing about revision!) will make the writing faster.

PROFESSIONAL LIFE:

Build out and launch a website. If you’re reading this, I may have succeeded!

Work on building writing community.

Write a blog (again, if you’re reading this, yay me!). No idea how consistent I’ll be, but I want to be able to start a good repository of my experiences for me and anyone else those stories might help down the road.

I am as resolute as I can be. Certainly resolute enough to be at least a boat-turned-desk kind of writer. Whatever comes next, I’m looking forward to figuring out how to be the best version of that writer I can be.

Note: all my facts came from things I learned in a book about the White House I read as a kid, verified by Wikipedia searching. This isn’t a research essay…I’m just a curious person with a blog.

Other note: Thanks, Tim, for everything. Also: thanks for reading, friend. Welcome aboard.