I just reread Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook yesterday.

It’s great fun, lots of useful advice. It’s also a beautiful book.

The section on revision was particularly helpful to me right now.

I try to jam everything I can think of in my first draft/s so and trim it back later. Jeff agrees:

“Exactly because revision combines analysis and redeploying your creativity, most things you get wrong in your first draft can be fixed in revision, especially as you gain experience. Usually, however, it is easier if you have too much in your first draft rather than too little; mangled can be altered more readily than the invisible.”

Somewhere in that chapter he commented about. revision being a learnable skill. You get better over time, or at least get better at knowing the mistakes you make and side step them in new first drafts. A good reminder to get in the reps and take it seriously.

He also mentions that we have to get excited about revision.

More time is spent revising than writing and each pass and each rewrite improves the story. The more time spent in this process, the better the final product.

“Perhaps the most important part of that process is the idea of the act of revision becoming exciting to you. The more positive you can be about the revision process, the more likely you are to actually dig into the guts of your fiction in a meaningful way.”

And we have to do this under maximum self-loathing and we must use the delete key.

“Simple self-loathing and disgust at the blindingly pathetic horribleness of your own words may not be enough. You have to be willing to sacrifice pages of rough draft and to perhaps radically change or add to what’s left.”

Everything I write so very bad, which is good. I can tell, I can detect it, there is some level of taste operating and a gap between this taste and the skill of word generation. Close the gap.

Reminds me of Ira Glass on taste: (quote butchery and emphasis mine)

…All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. […] We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. […] It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions…

The chapter has a ton of quotes from writers about revision and self-loathing and it’s wonderful!

There are some excellent exercises and tools to help.

I like the idea of reverse outlining: List all the scenes, list all the actions, ask a whole lot of questions about each scene.

I also like the idea of looking at the story or at the main character through the lens of other characters.

“Revision is hard, repetitive work, but it teaches you about language and narrative at an immersive, nitty-gritty level. It also requires certain optimal conditions, which may vary for every writer.”

Good revision requires:

  • Time away from the story
  • A change in form factor (font, paper size, read aloud, handwrite, retype, etc.)
  • Different types of revision (structure, chapter, scene, language, etc.)
  • etc.

At the top of the chapter, Jeff recommends the book “Revising Fiction” by David Madden.

I grabbed a copy and it’s a book full of hard questions to ask about your text. Questions to debug the story, find where the issues could be, sniff out candidate directions for improvement.

Some of the questions are truly brutal ("Question 184: Is your story uninteresting?"), but someone as to ask them!

Back to it!