CHAPTER 10
REVISION: REAL WRITERS REVISE

BY PETER SELGIN

I write fiction for the same reason people believe in God, to give meaning and order to life, or at least to give it some shape here and there. Like many people, I’m uncomfortable with chaos and disorder. The studio where I write contains a medley of tidily arranged shelves, bookcases, and surfaces, jars neatly bristling with writing implements, and notebooks arranged by size, category, and date, all within arm’s reach. I’m pathologically tidy. But I’m far from alone. For damning evidence of man’s fixation with order look no farther than heaven; what are the constellations, but tidy boxes in which we’ve shelved the stars? The Big Dipper is cosmic fiction.

When I teach fiction, I alarm my students right up front by announcing that I’m not going to teach them how to write, that, as a matter of fact, I can’t. I can only teach them how to rewrite, to reconsider what they’ve written, and then revise it. The writing, the getting something down on paper, that’s really all up to them. Once they’ve got something written down—when they’re ready to make order from chaos—then I may just have something to offer.

FIRST DRAFTS

Before we decide how to revise, it helps to have something to revise, namely, a first draft. “All that matters,” said Hemingway of first drafts, “is that you finish it.” Elsewhere I’ve heard it said that a first draft should be written with the heart, whereas subsequent drafts must bring to bear that more critical organ, the brain.

Papa Hemingway, not one to mince words, also called first drafts “excrement.” That’s harsh, but also liberating. It’s okay if a first draft sucks; it should suck; it’s supposed to suck. The only thing a first draft needs to do is get finished. Get something down on paper. Be reckless, be shameless, be grossly irresponsible and self-indulgent, even, but get something down.

And remember: when writing first drafts, you should not be editing. A writer friend of mine who owns a collection of hats wears one—a red baseball cap with KEROUAC stitched in gold over the visor—while writing her first drafts, and another—Chinese, tutti-frutti, shaped like a funnel—when revising them. This, I’ll admit, is pushing things, and I also think it odd that the funnel should be for the editor, but it illustrates a point: that though they share the goal of creating a work of literary art, editing and writing are different disciplines requiring different temperaments, different skills. While the woman in the red baseball cap may be driven by pure instinct and emotion, half-poet, half-ape, whosoever dons the tutti-frutti Chinese cap must be an emotionless diagnostician, probing each word, sentence, and paragraph with a screwdriver in one hand and a scalpel or a hatchet in the other.

However inspired, first drafts can always stand improvement. “No sentimentality about this job,” wrote Daphne du Maurier of the editor’s task. And while there may be nothing sentimental about revision, though by turns terrifying, cold-blooded, and brutal, editing can be enjoyable. With experience the fiction writer learns not only how to find and solve technical problems but that solving such problems in a manuscript can be as creative as writing that first draft. In fact, editing can be edifying, so beware: you may never want to take off that conical, tutti-frutti Chinese hat.

Still, you’re reluctant. You’ve finished the first draft. It sits on your desktop, next to your computer, a stack of pages sprinkled with words—your words. Maybe you worked in a white heat, following Jack Kerouac’s famous dictum “First thought, best thought,” flinging sentences like Jackson Pollock flinging paint. Or else you worked cautiously, glacially, like William Styron, who, writing his extra-long novels, felt compelled to hone each sentence to perfection before proceeding to the next, his perfected prose accruing like plaque on the teeth. Either way, you think the work done. And maybe it is.

But most likely it’s not. Few of us are William Styrons, who called his own working method “hell.” Be honest with yourself and you’ll admit that for every sentence hurled down onto your page like a lightning bolt from

Zeus, ten others must be dug up like root vegetables from the humble soil, from which they emerge covered with dirt and manure.

Some writers may feel that once their raw genius has been spilled onto the page it’s up to someone else to clean it up; that’s what editors are for. In the good old days of publishing this may have been slightly true. There was a time when a guy like Thomas Wolfe could plop a manuscript as bulky and disheveled as himself onto an editor’s desk and hope to have it published—and would, providing the editor was Maxwell Perkins, the legendary Scribner’s editor who whipped Wolfe and notable others into print.

Those days, sadly, are gone, as are men like Perkins. Today the typical editor is a harried creature, with more urgent things to do than edit your novel or story. Darken his or her desk with a manuscript in need of editing and it will be read “very quickly.” So, you should revise. In fact, if there isn’t one already, there ought to be a bumper sticker: real writers revise!

PRELUDE TO REVISION

Before revision can begin, however, before we slice open the body of our stories or novels and muck around in search of tumors, extraneous organs, and signs of internal bleeding, our words, together with our emotions, need to have grown cold, sober, well rested. Insomnia, intoxication, frenzied passion, and/or too much caffeine are not things wanted in a surgeon.

Hence, do not revise in the throes of creative ecstasy, or when angry, upset, exhausted, depressed, or filled with self-doubt, dread, or loathing. You’ve printed out your first draft? Good. Let it sit. Do something else for a while, work on another project, take two weeks and tour the Greek Islands—bring your watercolors and your scuba gear. Soak your weary soul in the wine-dark sea, while letting your manuscript grow clammy-cold. Distance, we’re told, makes the heart grow fonder. It also makes editing easier. A paradox: the less we recognize our own words, the better equipped we are to judge them. Just as distance makes the heart grow fonder, familiarity breeds contempt, or, worse, a false sense of inevitability, turning our sentences into ruts in an oft-traveled road.

Still, you needn’t go as far as Neil Armstrong went to gain distance on your words. Some writers write in the morning, and then, in the afternoon or evening, revise what they’ve written. Others wait until the next day, when they can be sure they’re no longer in love or hate with what they wrote the day before. But revising in too much of a hurry has its perils. Here’s Virginia Woolf in her diary The Voyage Out on revising:

When I read the thing over (one very gray evening) I thought it so flat and monotonous that I did not even “feel” the atmosphere: certainly there was no character in it. Next morning I proceeded to slash and rewrite, in the hope of animating it, and (as I suspect for I have not re-read it) destroying the one virtue it had—a kind of continuity; for I wrote it originally in a dream-like state, which was at any rate, unbroken … I have kept all the pages I cut out, so the thing can be reconstructed precisely as it was.

Woolf makes a good case for saving all drafts. And given the luxury of more time she might not have, as it were, thrown out the Wedgwood with the dishwater.

But what if, after a day or two, you still can’t see clearly what you’ve written, and you can’t afford a trip to Greece, or you don’t have or want the luxury of more time? Or you’re on deadline, with an editor’s hot breath wilting the short hairs behind your neck? How, then, to cool a manuscript quickly, and make your all-too-familiar words less familiar?

Try reading your words aloud to yourself, sharpened pencil in hand. Read loud and clear—hurling each word like a stone at an imaginary audience. Imagine that somewhere in that audience is your ideal reader. Maybe he or she is your favorite writer, the ghost of Jane Austen or Bill Faulkner. See her sitting there with her own sharpened pencil, or, in Faulkner’s case, a flask of bourbon. As you read, imagine her facial reactions; see her twitching, scowling, smiling, or wincing at certain words. And listen to yourself. Words sound different to our ears than to our eyes. You’ll hear not only faulty rhythms and errors in logic but pretentious language, clichés, digressions, and a host of other sins. You’ll be surprised how much editing pencil gets on your pages this way. If reading aloud to Faulkner’s ghost is too intimidating, select a more benign imaginary listener, your grandmother or the freshman comp teacher who gave you an A+ on that essay about truffle hunting in Normandy with your crazy French uncle.

Some people don’t even like going to the movies alone, and may balk at reading alone to themselves, in which case they should find someone to read to. Not an editor, or even a fellow writer, just someone who likes to be read to (believe it or not, such people exist). They needn’t comment. In fact, better if they don’t. They aren’t there to critique, but to react, to help you hear in your own words what you need to hear.

Or have someone read your words to you. Having your own words thrown back to you in another’s voice—with their inflections, stumbles, laughter, tears, wincing, and cringing—can greatly enhance the revision process. You can also read your own words into a tape recorder and then play it back. Me, I prefer a warm body.

YOUR TURN:
Return to something you have written, perhaps from one of the previous exercises. Read it aloud. As you read, make notes on what you think can be improved. If you find yourself bored as you read, odds are the readers will be bored too. Ask yourself why the piece is less than thrilling. And any words or sentences that make you (or your imaginary reader) wince or cringe should be treated as suspect. As a bonus round, revise the piece based on your notes.

Two other solutions remain. The first is so simple it’s almost embarrassing, yet it works. Print out your chapter or story in an unusual, but legible, font. Your words will seem like strangers to you, and you can begin to edit them.

The ultimate solution is to get help, that is, if you’re lucky enough to know a sympathetic reader who is also a skilled editor. By sympathetic I mean sympathetic to your intentions as well as to your overall style. Their ranks being swollen by struggling writers, professional editors are by no means hard to come by; for a price you can have your pick of them. But beware, even the costliest and most experienced editor may be, if not plain wrong, a poor fit for your writing. Professional or not, an editor’s opinion is still an opinion. And many a good writer has had the guts yanked out of his or her prose by some “expert” editor. Remember that last botched haircut? Editors are like barbers. If you find a good one, consider yourself blessed and chain yourself to her. Better still, give her your manuscript, and go to Greece.

That said, no editor’s advice should be followed slavishly. It’s your work. You’ve got to know when to listen to suggestions, and when to say no, thanks. Sometimes an editor’s efforts will tighten and clean up your prose when you want it ragged and filthy. Also bear in mind that editors tend to err on the side of caution. As Tennessee Williams said to Gore Vidal after Vidal finished editing one of his short stories, “You have corrected all my faults, and they are all I have!”

THE REVISION PROCESS

So, you’re willing and ready to revise. But what to revise, how to revise, how much to revise?

“Revise till your fingers bleed.”

—Donald Newlove

“Don’t f—with it too much.”

—Lawrence Durrell

Two great writers, two seemingly irreconcilable pieces of advice. How to reconcile them? Whose advice to take?

The purpose of multiple drafts is to discover what we’re writing, and then to refine it into its ultimate form. Think of a painter with a canvas. She paints all day, perhaps for days, then scrapes and starts over. She may go through this process a dozen times, more, before emerging with a masterpiece. Are all those scraped efforts wasted? Of course not; they’re all part of the process.

Initially, revision is often a matter of reenvisioning. From our first drafts we may take only a good character, or a scene, maybe a description, an opening sentence, possibly a theme—the rest is a shroud of disposable words. And yet, if it has served up any one of those things, all that writing wasn’t in vain.

Suggestion: having finished a first draft, start over again. Put in a fresh piece of paper or open a fresh document on your computer, and start typing, this time with a sure, or surer, sense of what it is that you’re writing. Refer to your draft, if and when it contains something worth referring to. Otherwise, write from scratch. D. H. Lawrence did so three times with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, producing three novels on the same subject, never referring to the existent versions. Old words can block fresh insights.

YOUR TURN:
Return to something you have written, perhaps from one of the previous exercises. Reenvision the piece. Read it through several times, asking yourself what is most original or powerful about this piece. It may be a character, a theme, a stray idea, even a single line. Now be bold. Toss out everything but this one promising thing. Start over, writing the piece entirely from scratch.

But two drafts may be just the beginning. It’s not unheard of for a writer to go through twenty drafts, or more, on a single story. I know. I’ve done it. And twenty drafts later some of those stories still molder in a file drawer, unpublished. Does that make me a fool? No, because after twenty-one drafts, they may be published. On the other hand, I’ve had stories published that took only two drafts.

The fact is, some stories are easier to write than others. But the hard ones are no less worth writing. Be prepared to see your work through many revisions. Raymond Carver, one of this country’s best short-fiction writers, has confessed to revising his stories on average no fewer than a dozen times. He understood as well as anyone that real writers revise.

THE BIG PICTURE

If a first draft is the place to write from the heart, free of worry, subsequent drafts are the place to worry about everything, and heed all the sage advice on craft doled out in this book. You may choose to spend whole drafts focusing only on a single craft element. Perhaps you go through each scene finessing only dialogue, then spend the next draft coalescing elements of theme. Whatever your approach, before addressing little things—like whether to use a dash or parentheses—you want to make sure the Big Things are in order.

Some of the Big Things to consider:

CHARACTER

When you get down to it, people are interested in people. That’s why they read fiction.

Some questions to ask about the characters in your work: First, Do I have all the characters I need to tell my tale? If so, Can I afford to lose a few? Can my protagonist do with two buddies, or one, instead of three? When considering the number of characters with which to tell a story, as with so many things, less is more. It’s also less work.

Once you’ve established that you have all the characters you need and no more, then ask yourself: Are any of my main characters too flat? Do they fulfill their roles too neatly, too glibly? When we assign characters narrow, predictable roles in our fiction, we are essentially condemning them to be archetypes, if not stereotypes. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing.”

Finally, ask yourself: Are my main characters sufficiently motivated? A character with no goals to struggle toward, who exists at the mercy of outside forces, we call a cipher. Voltaire’s Candide is such a character; so is Mersault in Camus’s novel The Stranger. But unless you’re writing a satirical fable or an existential novel, your characters should want things.

PLOT

If I had to choose a formula for plot, I’d go with the English poet Philip Larkin, who described a story as consisting of three parts: a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

Beginnings are crucial. If the beginning of a story is weak, chances are no one will ever get to the “muddle,” let alone the end. Writers are routinely advised by editors and other meddlers to grab their readers by the throat within a paragraph or a page. Sometimes this works. There’s something irresistible about:

Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours.

—the opening of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. But not all readers want to be grabbed by their throats. Some prefer to be gently seduced, in which case a sly wink or a wiggled finger may trump a grappling hook, as with Moby-Dick’s come-hither opening:

Call me Ishmael.

The point is you don’t have to be sensational to be amusing, entertaining, or interesting. Think of yourself as a guest who has just arrived at a party. You wish to make a strong impression. You can strangle the hostess; that should do it. Or tinkle your wineglass and tell a story in your own beguiling voice, a story filled with charm, eccentricity, and colorful details, that takes place in a provocative and/or magical setting. In other words, you can hook your reader without breaking, or even bruising, her neck.

The other good news about beginnings—one can often be obtained simply by amputating the first paragraphs, pages, or chapters of a draft, what editors refer to smugly as “throat clearing.” Ask yourself, What’s the first interesting thing that happens in my story? Begin there.

Having finished your first draft, you can be fairly sure the muddle’s there, right where it ought to be, in the middle. The middle is the meat of the sandwich. It consists of an event or group of events, leading to the biggest event of all, the climax. As I’ve said, motivate characters sufficiently, and select a limited number of telling moments from their lives, and, providing you’ve chosen and shaped each of those scenes to something near perfection, the middle more or less takes care of itself.

The question to ask is, Have I judiciously selected the necessary events with which to tell my story? John Gardner speaks of the “rule of elegance and efficiency,” meaning if you can tell a story in four scenes, don’t tell it in five. When, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald paints us a wonderful scene of Gatsby heaving his multicolored shirts onto his bed before Daisy’s sparkling eyes, he feels no subsequent need to escort us into Gatsby’s garage and have him show off his Studz Bearcat.

With endings, though we may aim straight for a point on the horizon, it’s better if we don’t arrive there, exactly. It’s also likely that we won’t, since our characters, being motivated, are apt to find their own solutions to their goals and frustrations, and these in turn will have their own dramatic repercussions. Assuming all does not go as expected, the ending of a story should be unpredictable not only for the reader but for the writer.

That said, an ending that’s surprising but also unlikely, if not impossible, is by no means satisfying. The thing to aim for, in novels and stories, is the ending that’s both surprising and inevitable. Ideally, the reader’s first response should be My God! followed shortly thereafter by But of course!—since a good ending is always the direct result of everything that has come before.

POINT OF VIEW

Decisions about point of view are often made for the writer, dictated, so to speak, by the nature of the material. And most of the time our writer’s instincts won’t steer us wrong. But telling a story a certain way instinctively doesn’t make it the right, let alone the only, or the ultimate, way.

Having finished your first draft, ask yourself: Have I chosen the best possible point of view? Should I stick to this one character’s viewpoint, or alternate between characters? These are big questions, indeed. Still, to not ask them would be a mistake. True, what you’ve written may work just fine, in which case why change it? Then again, if a story or scene isn’t working, the first culprit to round up and sit under the interrogator’s lamp is point of view.

Each point-of-view option has its advantages and disadvantages. The third-person POV is the least problematic. A third-person narrative is more flexible, allowing for a wide range of diction and greater perspective. On the other hand, who would want The Catcher in the Rye in third person? Or Huckleberry Finn? Had Melville written, “His name was Ishmael,” well, what a shame. A first-person narrator is all intimacy, all voice; we’re getting the goods straight from the hero’s mouth.

Then again, as a first-person narrator, Madame Bovary would be insufferable, if not impossible. Nor could Jay Gatsby by any means tell his own story.

And, of course, whatever POV choice you make, keep it consistent.

DESCRIPTION

“Go in fear of abstractions,” said the poet Ezra Pound. And though he went nuts, Ezra was right about some things.

When writing description, you want your reader to hear, see, smell, taste, and feel what your characters hear, see, smell, taste, and feel; you want specific sensations that grip the senses, not the intellect. Though abstract words like beautiful and mysterious seem to convey qualities of universality and timelessness, they leave most readers snoring. To say Sally had beautiful strawberry-blond hair is to say next to nothing. But Sally’s hair streamed like turnings of steaming copper and bronze from a spinning lathe, down both sides of her face—now, that says something.

With description, the particular always trumps the general, and concrete always trumps abstract. Here’s Shakespeare writing up a storm:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires
Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire! Spout rain!

A vast improvement over It was a dark and stormy night, don’t you agree? I’ve highlighted the modifiers; there are a few. But what modifiers! Thought-executing and oak-cleaving are nouns and verbs pressed into service as adjectives, and so they give us the concrete jolt of solid, moving objects. Likewise all-shaking. White, like all words standing for colors, is a concrete abstraction. As adjectives go, sulphurous is also concrete; you can almost smell it. The one truly abstract word here is ingrateful. (Even the Bard nods, occasionally.)

Still, when choosing concrete details, it pays to be selective. D. H, Lawrence, talking about details, draws a distinction between what he calls “the quick and the dead,” the quick being “lifeblood,” and the dead being … well, dead. The first things you notice about a person or a place are most likely the “quick” things; the rest are likely dead.

DIALOGUE

A few words on dialogue. Concise: the fewer words to make a point, the better. Subtext: it’s not what characters say, but what they mean, that counts. Illogical: people are illogical, especially when they speak, especially when they argue. Adversarial: and they should argue. We learn much more when characters disagree, or have different philosophies. Dialogue should never be tape-recorder real; a few hours spent in the company of a courtroom transcript will drive that point home. But it should be speakable, another reason to read your words out loud.

Try not to force dialogue into your characters’ mouths. If you know your characters well, and have motivated them successfully, they should know what to say and when to say it, placing you in the humble role of stenographer.

Pay attention to the ratio of scene to summary, of dialogue to description. (This matter relates to pacing as well as to dialogue, affecting your decisions on which events to compress and which to expand.) A skilled author layers scene with summary, weaving and blending the two, aware that the best narratives are like roller-coaster rides, with slow climbs of exposition leading to swift falls of dramatic conflict. But there’s no one way to build a roller coaster. And while one author favors dialogue over summary (Elmore Leonard springs to mind), another, say, Jens Christian Grondahl, author of the novel Silence in October (about a man whose wife has left him and who spends the novel’s 280 pages reflecting on this and other matters) eschews dialogue entirely. When we call a work of fiction fast-paced, that’s a quantitative, not a qualitative, judgment. Writing fiction isn’t the Indy 500. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race, else we’d all have to agree that Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm Lowry, to name but a few, are snail-paced, and hence lousy, writers.

SETTING

Context is everything, and our fates are determined as much by landscape as by geography. Set Madame Bovary in Beverly Hills in the 1990s, and you have no story. Our readers should be grounded in the time and place of our stories. This can be as easy as popping in a date here and there, or as subtle as a poster promoting the Works Progress Administration. A story set in Los Angeles hangs in a buttery layer of smog, while one set in New Orleans drips wrought iron and Spanish moss; a romance pitched against a “dark and stormy night” is bound to play out differently than one set on a bright, sunny day. Setting is character, after all, and imposes its own demands on plot.

Also look for ways to use setting metaphorically. The ubiquitous fog through which we view the London of Dickens’s Bleak House evokes perfectly the dreary murkiness of the British court system that is the book’s subject. In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the novel’s setting is also its primal image: a lake that literally and figuratively drowns both the past and the present.

FLASHBACKS

In his early novel The Centaur, John Updike spends three tightly packed pages taking his reader on a side trip to New York City that has little, if anything, to do with the scene at hand, which takes place in a car on its way to a school on a snowy morning in Brewer, Pennsylvania. Strictly speaking, this sort of thing is what writers call a digression, except it isn’t. Updike gets away with it, so we call it a flashback. Essentially, a flashback is a digression that works. How does Updike get away with a three-page flashback? First of all, by writing like John Updike, which never hurts. Second, by knowing just how far a reader’s attention can be diverted from a scene before she either forgets the scene entirely or, worse, bails out.

Beginning authors often lose sight of their own scenes, letting them drift into flashbacks like Arctic explorers into snowstorms, never to be seen or heard from again. A master like Updike always knows what scene he’s writing within, and how much tension it can hold. He knows he’s got three pages in which to reminisce and sightsee, then the train leaves without him, Updike is also smart enough not to break into full-blown dialogue, knowing this might confuse the reader into thinking he’s abandoned one scene to enter a new one, and to the same end limits his flashback to a single paragraph, however long.

Thus a general (and, to be sure, breakable) rule for flashbacks: keep them very brief. If a flashback insists on turning into a full-blown scene, consider putting it elsewhere, or giving it its own section or chapter.

VOICE

With the first few paragraphs of a story or novel, you make a contract with your reader. You agree to tell a particular kind of story in a particular voice. Whatever you contract to do, as with POV, you contract to do it consistently. And though it may be the hobgoblin of little minds, half of what we do as editors is done in the name of consistency.

It can even be argued that what we call style is little more than a writer’s tics and mannerisms rendered consistent through editing to produce a narrator’s voice. Do something weird once in a while and it’s a mistake; do it consistently, and it’s a style. A stylist, then, is a writer who pays particular attention to what I’ll call the details: to language, punctuation, the use of figurative devices, sentence rhythms, and the overall music of words. I can’t teach you to be poets, I tell my students, but I can teach you to be stylists. For the fiction writer, that’s close enough.

But the very thought of a style throws many good writers, and their writing, into disarray. That’s because many beginning writers worship an ideal of style that has nothing to do with its practice. Think of an actor wanting to look and sound like Marlon Brando, who assuredly had no such intention himself. Just as actors are born with certain equipment, each writer has particular strengths and gifts and must learn to work with, and not against, them.

The term journalese was, I think, coined by Hemingway to describe prose that, like most newspaper stories, is made to be read once, if that. If a story or book gets read twice or more, it’s not for the story or even for the plot, but for the language, for the unique pleasures offered by a specific arrangement of words. Hence, if you want your stuff read only once, skip this part.

With journalese the reader gets all of the necessary information in the proper order. But the sentences just sit there; there’s concision, but little if any music; there are characters, but there’s no voice. As for poetry, or music, or something approximating those things, there’s none to speak of. You’ve told your story, you’ve done an adequate, journeymanlike job. Which is to say your prose is dull, if not dead.

Try pitching your voice higher. Remember His name was Ishmael? The third person makes it weak. But suppose Melville had stuck to his first-person guns and written, My name is Ishmael. Or: They call me Ishmael. Or even: You can call me Ishmael. Compared to Call me Ishmael, all three versions frankly suck. This doesn’t mean that by casting all of your sentences in the imperative you too can write a masterpiece. It means that writing powerfully means taking risks, daring to have a strong character like Ishmael pound out his first spoken words like a sledgehammer pounding red-hot steel. Or, at the other extreme, having the guts to let a spineless character like John Barth’s protagonist in The End of the Road introduce himself like so: “In a sense, I am Jacob Horner …” One way or another, the author must take a stand with his material, must assume a position of authority, even the authority of weakness, and hold it, and not let go, ever.

THEME

As I’ve said, we read fiction to learn about people. And though we may start with some notion of a theme, we needn’t know exactly what we’re writing about until we’ve written it. As the historian Daniel J. Boorstin famously said, “I write to discover what I think.” By writing we stumble upon our themes. They are the result, not the cause.

Still, when themes emerge, as writers we’re responsible for recognizing and highlighting them. For instance, in The Great Gatsby, as the theme of financial greed grew out of his material, Fitzgerald chose to color the light at the end of Daisy’s dock green, and to mention it not once but several times, including the most conspicuous place, at the novel’s conclusion.

Writers don’t plant themes, they find and nurture them, make them resonate for the reader, dress them up and display them. And, if they’re as good as Fitzgerald, they do so with a subtlety bordering on the invisible.

YOUR TURN:
Return to something you have written, perhaps from one of the previous exercises. Revise the piece, making some kind of major adjustment—changing the point of view, overhauling the dialogue, altering the setting … As you revise, force yourself to focus solely on this single craft element. If so desired, you may take another round of revision, focusing on another major craft element. With so many craft elements to juggle, often it’s nice to focus on just one thing at a time.

SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF

Now, with the Big Things in place, comes the time for microrevision. You’ve heard the saying “Don’t sweat the small stuff” Now’s the time to sweat it. But fear not: this part can be as much fun as that fevered first draft. This is where you get to sharpen your editing pencil and line-edit yourself into the next best thing to a poet: a literary stylist.

Once again, this is a good time to read your stuff aloud. Any little thing that trips you up as you read is worth marking and reconsidering.

It’s also a good time to hand your work over to a trusted colleague for some feedback, with the understanding that you are the final judge of what stays and goes.

Some Little Things to consider:

GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION

Grammar is a convention, something that civilized people can agree upon, and, like all conventions, creative souls are free to depart from it, with good reason. In writing this sentence, I spell the words according to Webster’s dictionary, pause with a comma after the word sentence, capitalize the first word, and end with a period. but what if i chooz not to dew so what if i chooz to dispense with speling an punkchewayshun an yooz ownlee lowurkaze ledderz My guess is you’ll be confused, if not flabbergasted.

Grammar is one of the few things, maybe the only thing, that keeps writers civilized. Use it. Not slavishly or mindlessly, but with due respect for the powerful minds that have brought it to bear over the ages. An indented paragraph is a lovely thing; why so many choose to dispense with indents is beyond me. Punctuation marks are dramatic personae: the ebullient exclamation mark, the impulsive dash, the coy ellipse, the intellectual semicolon. A simple comma, improperly placed, can make all the difference. Pardon, impossible to be hanged, wrote the king’s page, when what he meant to write was, Pardon impossible, to be hanged. In both cases he should have used a semicolon, but let’s not quibble.

But this is no place for a grammar lesson; a good book on English usage can give you that. Also, if you haven’t done so already, buy a copy of The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White. This modestly slim volume takes up no more space than T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, and it’s as good. Whatever you need to know about the uses and abuses of English is in there, and more, including such disarming advice as “Be clear.”

Not that you should sell your artistic soul to Messrs. Strunk and White, or to anyone else. But before breaking conventions, know them, at least. Only once mastered can they be broken with flair. Otherwise, people may just think you’re dumb.

THE LESS-THAN-PERFECT IMPERFECT TENSE

When it comes to good prose, the imperfect tense—i.e., he was talking; she was going; they were screaming—could not be more aptly named. The words is, was, and were are all variants of the verb to be, which, among dead verbs, wears the heavyweight crown. While most verbs are chosen for their evocative powers, to be paints no picture in the mind, conveys no action, makes not the slightest dent in the reader’s psyche. It says practically nothing. To find a deader word, one must reach for an article or a conjunction, such as the or and or but.

Which begs the question: why do writers use, let alone overuse, the imperfect tense? Why write, Sam was wearing a pink rugby shirt, when you could say just as easily that he wore one? Why Susan was running, when if she ran she’d get there faster?

True, in conversation people tend to use the imperfect tense. It sounds friendlier, softer. Which explains why, in the merry, merry month of May, I didn’t walk down the street one day; I was walking. For sure, the past imperfect has its place, and not just in corny old songs. But used too frequently, out of sheer lazy habit, like a carnivorous wasp it sucks the meat out of otherwise healthy writing. That space taken up by was might have held a stronger, more active verb. My cousin Gilberto was at the dinner table. Okay. My cousin Gilberto slumped at the dinner table. Better.

MIND YOUR METAPHORS

A metaphor is a poetic device whereby one thing is described in terms of another. Lester’s mouth is an open sewer is, we hope, a metaphor. Add the word like, and you get the watered-down version, Lester’s mouth is like an open sewer—a simile. My rule, if there is one, being this: if you can change a simile into a metaphor without confusing people, do so. Why say what something is like, when you can say what it is? Your reader isn’t stupid. The reader knows you’re being figurative; to be told so is an insult. And you must never insult, or underestimate, your reader.

About mixing metaphors: don’t. If the art deco hotel in your novel starts off looking like an ocean liner, don’t turn it into a wedding cake. If a metaphor starts out watery, keep it watery. If the stage floor under the spotlights looks like a strip of sandy beach, the shifting, murmuring audience may be likened to surf, but not a field of Kansas corn. Steinbeck wrote, “Words pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.” Metaphors are onions. Be careful, or they’ll stink up everything in the icebox.

MIND YOUR MODIFIERS

A modifier is a word—adjective or adverb—that modifies another word. One hopes that in modifying, the modifier adds meaning that isn’t already there. The trouble with most adjectives and adverbs is that they’re dead wood. Desperately lonely is such a case. The desperation of loneliness is implied by the word lonely; it doesn’t need help; it can manage fine on its own. Choose the right nouns and verbs, and you won’t need adverbs and adjectives. Go through and strike out any adjective or adverb that is either not doing much work or can be replaced by a noun or verb that will work much harder.

Of course, adjectives and adverbs needn’t be shunned entirely. The reason why modifiers have earned a bad reputation is because writers use them perfunctorily, and not as they ought to be used, to boldly send a noun or adjective somewhere it’s never been before. When, in his novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller, who loves his modifiers, describes General Dreedle’s ruddy, monolithic face, he adds something to that face that wasn’t there. When he modifies a silence with austere, the reader hears the silence differently. And when he endows obsequious military doctors and colonels with efficient mouths and inefficient eyes, the reader suspects she knows precisely what he means, even if she has no idea. “Go in fear of modifiers” doesn’t mean don’t use them; that’s the coward’s way out. It means use them boldly, bravely, but sparingly, as a chef uses spices.

KILL THOSE CLICHÉS

The novelist Martin Amis calls all writing a “campaign against cliché.” “Not just clichés of the pen,” he writes, “but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.”

A cliché is a figure of speech that once had its moment in the sun. Once upon a time, the phrase It’s raining cats and dogs was poetry worthy of Shakespeare. Now it’s just a poor little tired old cliché. Were you the first to coin that expression, you’d be rightly proud. But you’re not, and neither am I, and should either of us commit that particular string of words to paper, except as dialogue in the mouth of a bland character, we should be ashamed. We’re supposed to be writers; we’re supposed to come up with our own strings of words to describe the rain.

And that’s really all there is to cliché. When, reading over your draft, your eyes come upon a familiar grouping of words, odds are you’ve authored a cliché. It needn’t be as obvious or extravagant as It’s raining cats and dogs. A heart of stone is a cliché; so are baby-blue eyes; so is whatever gets handed to someone on a silver platter. Most clichés, in fact, are fairly prosaic: desperately lonely qualifies; so does wreaked havoc; so do abject poverty (what other kind is there?) and sweating profusely and every name in the book. Said too often, even “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,” Joyce’s most gorgeous line in Ulysses, risks turning into a cliché.

WATCH YOUR ATTRIBUTIONS

Said—that most watery of words—is the perfect host to dialogue: smooth, discreet, all but invisible, like the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. Therefore stop killing yourself to come up with new, improved ways of saying said. No need for she chuckled, barked, sighed, groaned. No need to have your characters intone, utter, or, worse, opine things, or spit or blurt them out. Nor is there good cause to have them affirm something with or without conviction, when they could just as easily say yes. Or, better still, nod.

I don’t mean to imply that said is the only allowable attribution. In its 340 pages, no character in Nelson Algren’s delectably odd-ball The Man with the Golden Arm ever says anything. Instead they: agreed / wanted to know / pointed out / assured / replied / demanded / told / warned / called / mourned / decided / put in cunningly. Algren is a master at avoiding said. On the other hand, Robert Stone, no less an author, never uses any other attribution. Both are brave, honorable men.

EXCOMMUNICATE THOSE LATINISMS

By my definition, a Latinism is an unnecessarily bulky word, typically derived from the Latin, when a simple, plain one would do. Hence, don’t have people converse when they can talk. If Hank goes to the package store, he can buy a bottle of rock and rye; he needn’t purchase it. As for words like variegated, ascertain, beneficial, extrapolate, resumption, extemporaneous, and preliminary (to give just a few exemplary examples), they belong in jargony annual reports, not in good fiction.

Why is so much academic writing bad? Because it’s pretentious; because it imitates clear, concise writing while being neither clear nor concise. People say lawyers write badly. But legal writing, done well, can be gorgeous (see Judge Woolsey’s opinion on Ulysses). Bad legal writing isn’t bad because it’s legal, but because it’s bad. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all bad writing is bad in pretty much the same handful of ways, pretentiousness being the worst.

The easiest way to be pretentious is to use pretentious words, words like ascertain and perpetrate. At this point in time we have ascertained that the perpetrator was apprehended … At this point in time I want you to forget forever the phrase at this point in time. Likewise forget the fact that and the question whether. Be on the lookout for words ending in tion. Ditto ism, acy, ance, ness, and ment. Such words are for politicians, not poets, and maybe for a few pretentious narrators like Nabokov’s Humbert, who’d be lost without his lexicon.

When in doubt, cross out or replace the overripe words. Simplify. Your readers will ???strike???extend gratitude to???strike??? thank you.

YOUR TURN:
Return to the piece from the previous exercise, upon which you tampered with something major. Even if you’re sick of it by now, stick with it. Revise the piece doing the following: 1) check the grammar; 2) weed out the be verbs, modifiers, clichés, and pretentious words, reserving the right to keep any of them you find absolutely necessary; 3) unmix any mixed metaphors; 4) adjust any attributions that call attention to themselves. You may look for all of these things at once or do them one at a time. When done, congratulate yourself for graduating to the role of an editor.

CUTTING AND TWEAKING

Readers are rude. They’ll put your story or novel down in the middle of that sublime passage you spent ten hours on and never pick it up again, without apology. The reader holds all the cards; he has no obligation to the writer, while the writer has every obligation to him. That’s why writers cut and tweak, mercilessly, throughout the revision process, down to its final stages.

There comes a time when you must cast a stern, judgmental eye on each and every one of your sentences, like a hanging judge whose noose is a sharpened pencil. No mercy here. As Don Newlove, the man with the bleeding fingers, says, “It’s best to cut, not just scrape.” And so your lead scalpel hovers over every line, every word.

“Omit needless words,” say Strunk and White. I couldn’t have said it better. For sure I couldn’t have said it more concisely.

So much cutting may seem masochistic, but the fact is a piece of writing that can work well in five thousand words shouldn’t run to ten thousand. And you’ll be surprised what you can cut. So much of what we state is implied; so much that we’ve spelled out can be deduced or imagined. Remember, the reader wants to participate in the story. Do all their imagining for them, and they feel left out. Furthermore, the reader’s imagination is a better writer than you or I will ever be, so why not let it do some of the work? And what we cut none but ourselves will ever miss. Unlike oil paints, words cost nothing; use as many as you like, scrape them all away, use some more—no charge. There’s no excuse, in other words, for saving your words.

By tweaking I mean crafting sentences and paragraphs, reorchestrating them, shifting and changing the words around until they’re as clear and pungent and crisp as possible. Like nipping and tucking, cutting and tweaking go hand in hand.

Tweaking may be less painful than cutting, but it’s trickier. It calls for experience. For every paragraph I’ve improved through tweaking, I’ve mutilated dozens. Literary surgeons, we practice on our own bodies, without anesthesia, and learn from our mistakes. But we learn.

Let me share with you, if I may, the evolution of a troublesome paragraph from my own novel, Life Goes to the Movies. The scene: a restaurant floating on the East River. In the book’s earliest draft the scene is merely sketched, with no attempt to evoke mood or atmosphere. It’s hardly written:

The wedding took place in August of 1985 on a barge on the East River, Brooklyn side. As if to celebrate the occasion the stars were out. A twelve-piece jazz orchestra played.

Journalese. Now strap yourselves into a time machine and skip ahead several drafts:

The wedding reception took place on a barge on the East River, with the Brooklyn Bridge humming its harpsong in the warm damp air high above us. Across the water, Manhattan’s rhinestone tiara glittered. Carved ice statues cradled sterling caviar buckets, while a twelve-piece swing orchestra in vanilla jackets and gold derbies bounced brass noodles and spun ribbons of silver into the breezy dark night.

My God, look at all those modifiers! Here the author reaches for a Fitzgeraldian lushness, and falls on his face. The rhinestone tiara is a cliché unfit for a pulp novelist. And then comes the adjectival parade—carved, sterling, vanilla, gold, brass, silver, breezy, dark—that leaves this reader lurching for a private barge from which to throw up. The brass noodles and silver ribbons were a valiant but misguided attempt at synesthesia, to turn notes for the ear into images for the eye. But the metaphor strays too far from its subject.

Glide your time machine forward eight months, through two more drafts, and read:

Montage. Night. A canvas-tented barge docked on the Brooklyn side of the East River. Summer drizzle softens the mucky air as the fabled bridge rasps with car traffic overhead. Ice mermaids cradle silver buckets of caviar, oysters on cracked ice squirm in ragged shells; shrimp cling for dear life above flaming seas of cocktail sauce. A swing orchestra in vanilla jackets and paper derbies weaves and thumps rhythms into the drizzling dark. Across the river, meanwhile, the Manhattan skyline wastes as much electricity as possible.

Better, but still too many modifiers. Here cutting will become part of the improvement process, as it usually does. How ‘bout this:

Montage. Night. A tented barge docked on the Brooklyn side of the East River. Summer drizzle softens the air as the bridge rasps with traffic overhead. Ice mermaids cradle buckets of caviar, oysters on cracked ice squirm in shells; shrimp cling for dear life above flaming seas of cocktail sauce. A swing orchestra weaves and thumps rhythms into the dark. Across the river, the Manhattan skyline wastes as much electricity as possible.

Now the brass noodles and silver ribbons have been swept off the dance floor, replaced instead by clinging shrimp and thumping rhythms. In keeping with the novel’s theme of life blending with movies, the screenplay language has been added. Here the emphasis is on verbs: tented, softens, rasps, cradle, cracked, squirm, cling, flaming (used adjectivally here, but keeping its verbal punch), weaves, thumps. Wastes as much electricity as possible strikes me now as passive, weak, but I could think of no active way of expressing that thought. Maybe you can.

For better or worse, that’s how the passage stands in the novel. You may disagree with my choices. But I think you will agree that overall the passage has been improved.

YOUR TURN:
Return to something you have written and, yes, you may use a previous exercise. Cut it by a third. It may seem impossible, but it probably isn’t. Be ruthless. Then take a break from the piece—a half hour or several days. See if the piece isn’t actually better, improved simply by the act of reduction. If you’re so inclined, get back in there and start tweaking, elevating what remains to a higher level of quality.

How do we know when we’re done? How do we know when our fiction has been improved to the point where it can be improved no more? Some writers claim they never really finish their stories or books; they abandon them. When the law of diminishing returns sets in, that’s as good a time as any to declare victory, or throw in the towel. For some writers, no story is finished until it’s between the covers of a published book. And even then they can’t stop tweaking.

And then there are those who say they simply know when the work is done; when all the planets seem to have aligned themselves, when form and meaning are so of a piece they seem indistinguishable, and every word feels inevitable, if not carved in stone. For me, it’s like raising children; at a certain age, ready or not, out they go. They must complete themselves out in the cruel, cold world. Perhaps some stories will never please certain people; perhaps they will never be universally loved and admired. But like their author they will have done their best.