Today’s Shelf Life is for all the stories out there that are sitting in the drafts folder, forgotten, or in the submissions folder, abandoned, because they didn’t quite come out how the author wished. Or maybe they did but then they didn’t attract agent or editor attention, never published, never sold. This Shelf Life is for all the stories that could have another lease on life if they just got revised.
In my mind I said “revised” in cursive letters and bookended with the sparkly star emoji. But I don’t have access to any of that nonsense in this app so you’ll just have to picture imagine how it sounded.
First let me say, for the record, that not every story needs to be revised. Off the top of my head I can think of two very good reasons why a story might not need to be revised:
You don’t feel like revising it.
It’s truly excellent without revision.
Regarding item 1: Most manuscripts need to go through a revision process after drafting in order to reach a level of quality that will appeal to readers. I’m shying away from the term publication quality today, though I use it often, because what even does publication quality mean? You can publish anything. There’s no requisite level of quality a manuscript must attain before it can be self- or traditionally published. The reason to see a manuscript through to a certain level of quality before publication is not because there’s some requirement of quality to publish but because many readers will not read a poor-quality story. That’s it.
When I say poor-quality, that’s a loaded term as well. Do I mean the book has typos? Formatting errors? Low production values? Or do I mean development or content issues, like the story has plot holes, the characters are flat, the writing is loaded with boring exposition, and so on? Poor-quality writing means something different to everyone.
Here is what I feel I can say unequivocally: Any first draft can be improved through revision.
However, the author may not feel like revising. The author may feel that they’re tired of working on the manuscript and they just want to be done with it. This could mean sticking it in the trunk, never to see the light of day, or this could mean pushing it out the door as-is, without revision. Maybe the author isn’t tired of working on it, but realizes it doesn’t have the skeleton of a good story—that it needs more revision work than it’s worth. For whatever reason, an author may decide to leave a story in the state of the first draft and move on to something else.
There is a fine distinction between item 1 and item 2. Many writers finish a draft and believe the manuscript is perfect as it is and requires no revision to meet or exceed the quality level of its peers and competition. This can be true, typically when an author has a lot of experience writing successfully published manuscripts. This is usually not true when a developing writer completes their first draft. When in doubt, have a beta reader with a critical eye take a look and confirm for you that the story is already perfect (or not).
Then, sometimes, you have a draft and you realize it isn’t all it could be. Maybe it’s crap and it could become okay. Maybe it’s okay and it could become excellent. If you have the time and energy and motivation, and you want to take that story to the next level, it’s time to tackle that revision.
I’ve written about revision and revising in Shelf Life before:
Those articles are a great place to start if you’re revising for the first time and want some guidance on how and why to revise. Today’s Shelf Life is just a little bit different. I’m going to present three revising tactics—or exercises—that you can try with a manuscript that needs revision when you’re not sure what the manuscript needs to make it shine. These are exercises I use myself when revising, particularly when I know I have something decent that could really shine but I can’t quite figure out how to take it to that next level. These tactics can help you look at your manuscript in a new way and, hopefully, shake loose exactly what your story needs to grow.
For the Story That Needs a Total Overhaul
Sometimes a story is not working and I’m not quite sure why. If I’m sure it’s not the plot—that is, if I’ve been through the plot and I’m sure it’s solid and compelling—and I know it’s not my characters, sometimes the answer is to retell the story from a different perspective.
Not every story lends itself to switching point-of-view character—for instance, you couldn’t tell Cast Away (2000) from Wilson’s point of view—and you don’t necessarily have to do that to retell the story from a different viewpoint. If there’s only really one character from whose point of view the story can be told, I might switch third-person close for first-person point of view.
If there’s more than one character in a story, then there’s more than one viewpoint from which that story could be told. Sometimes using an unlikely perspective to retell a story you’ve already worked through can force you to look at the story in a different way or develop creative solutions to share information among characters or with the reader. Another alternative is to retell your story from the perspective of someone who isn’t necessarily a character in the story: A bystander who saw everything, a historian studying a long-past event, or a detective piecing the events together without having been there.
Even if you decide to go back to your original narrator or point-of-view character, the exercise may uncover (or lead you to develop) details you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise that can be incorporated into the final draft.
For the Story That’s Not Quite Working
When a story is kind of working but not quite—I think writers will know what I mean. For instance, when you think you’ve got something great on your hands but early readers aren’t engaging with it, or it’s just feeling too slow, too fast, too exposition-heavy, too dialogue-heavy, or too dry. Try retelling the story in another chronological order of events to adjust the pacing, to distribute dialogue- and exposition-heavy sections more evenly, and spread exciting scenes around.
Stories don’t have to be told in the same order that events happen; in fact, a lot of stories would be less for being told chronologically. Pulp Fiction (1994) comes to mind. Another example I often think of is The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, which begins in the aftermath of a premeditated murder. The story then rewinds back to explain how the narrator first met his coconspirators and their victim and moves forward in time from there. Without the chronologic mixup, it’s just the tale of several ordinary college students forming a friend group. It’s only compelling because you already know these ordinary young adults are going to kill somebody.
A story can be told from earliest event to latest; or in reverse from latest to earliest; or with two timelines converging somewhere; or in any order of events the storyteller decides (like Pulp Fiction). Stories that start out slow or with a lot of exposition can put readers off of sticking with them; if that’s your story, consider pulling an action-packed, exciting, or intriguing scene from later in the story right to the very first page. Then after that scene your narrator can back up and explain how they got there.
This is a great method for rebalancing a story that sags or drags in certain spots. To paraphrase the immortal words of Dolly, if you see something sagging, bagging, or dragging, get it nipped, tucked, or sucked—into a different spot in the story.
For the Story That’s Almost There
Sometimes you’ve got a Mary Poppins story—practically perfect in every way—but unlike Mary Poppins it’s missing that sparkling finish. If you’re not sure how to get that high-polish finish, try the copyeditor’s secret weapon: The line edit.
All editors read and work “line by line,” so I know it’s not helpful when someone describes a line edit as an edit where the editor goes “line by line” through the story and edits it. It’s not like other types of editors read the story from the bottom of each page to the top, or read every other line. Acknowledged.
A line edit refers to an edit that looks at each line (or sentence) of a manuscript and makes sure each one, individually, is the best it can be, meaning:
Grammatically correct and free of misspellings, punctuation errors, and typos;
Avoids unnecessary filter language and eliminates overuse of adverbs;
Examines adverbial phrases to see if a more vivid verb phrase will work;
Ensures each word is “carrying its weight” in the sentence, paragraph, and story;
Removes extraneous words, sentences, and paragraphs for concise storytelling;
All while maintaining the author’s voice, tone, and intent (of course). If you, yourself, are the author, then this last bit should be easy.
A line edit is a labor-intensive endeavor but it’s a great way to make storytelling and prose shine. Every writer has their linguistic shortcuts, phrases and words they overuse, a part of speech they overuse (mine is gerunds), and so on. If you can make yourself go sentence by sentence through a story sentence by sentence examining each one closely and revising them to be as clear, concise, and beautiful as possible, you will quickly identify what yours are—and you’ll be better equipped in future drafts to spot those idiosyncrasies of your writing as you write them (and maybe stop depending on them altogether).
If your story has a solid plot, characters, pace, and balance, but it still feels just a little bit lackluster, then a line edit might be just the ticket to give it that final shove over the finish line.
Don’t forget the most important first step of any revision that you must take upon completing your draft: Stick that draft in a drawer for a bit—a week or two minimum—to get some distance from it. I know firsthand that being too close to your draft can make even the crappiest manuscript seem good. Give your draft some space to breathe. Then once it’s good an aerated, go for blood.
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