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  • Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein
    Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein
    by Julie Salamon

    My sister gave me this biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein for Christmas. It is a masterfully told tale of a complex woman, and a fantastic profile of what it takes to make art. I'd recommend it for anyone interseted in theater, writing, creativity and women making their way in the world.

writing in the real world ~ the basics
writing in the real world ~ blog archives
my favorite books about writing & creating
  • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
    Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
    by Anne Lamott

    The first book every would-be writer should read, because Lamott gets so much right.

  • The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
    The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
    by Twyla Tharp

    A really smart and practical book about how habits feed creativity.

  • The First Five Pages: A Writer'S Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
    The First Five Pages: A Writer'S Guide To Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
    by Noah Lukeman

    Excellent advice for the beginning writer.

  • The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It . . . Successfully
    The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It . . . Successfully
    by Arielle Eckstut, David Henry Sterry

    An indespensible guide for anyone thinking at all seriously about publishing -- either self publishing or traditional publishing. The authors are super savvy.

  • The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
    The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself
    by Susan Bell

    An extremely practical, useful book on editing. Should be on every writer's shelf.

the truth about revision

Revision is not the same thing as writing. That’s the big secret, the truth that will help you move forward with your work. In her fantastic book, The Artful Edit, Susan Bell says, “We write in a void; we edit into a universe.” That’s the best description of the difference I’ve ever heard, and here’s what it means in practice:

  • When you write, you’re filling a void. There’s nothing there, and you want to fill it with something. You often wonder if you can, if you should, if what you have in mind will be a good fit for the void. Sometimes you wonder if anyone else is also filling in that void, and if they’re doing a better job of it. When you’re on a roll with your writing, and in the zone, and the voices of doubt are momentarily silenced, you feel the pure exhilaration of creation. There was nothing…and now there’s something and you made it.
  •  When you revise you need to hang up your writing hat. Sure, you’ll have to grab it in order to write a new scene or a great bit of dialogue or a killer line at the end of chapter seven, but for the most part, you’re not acting as a writer anymore. You’re not acting out of pure creative intention. When you edit, you judge. You step back and you critique. You weigh and you decide. And sometimes you decide to do things that really hurt – like throw out 50 pages – or 300. The big difference is that you’re wrestling with the material rather than creating the material. You’re looking at it from all angles, circling it, considering it. I recently heard novelist Laura Dave in conversation at a bookstore, and she said that when she starts tossing out large hunks of material she gets excited, because she knows she’s finally getting close to understanding her story. I think that’s an excellent attitude.

So how do you do a full manuscript edit?

  • Holly Lisle has an awesome system on her site.  It’s designed for novelists.
  • Timothy Hallinan has a powerful system, too. His section on “the dead scene” is especially useful. That’s where this link will take you.

Here’s what I do – and it works for fiction and non-fiction alike.

  1. If I have identified that there are some big problems with a draft  -- problems that won't go away or can't seem to be fixed -- I start with a blank page and REALLY try as hard as I can to think of it as NEW. A new path, a new voice, a new way completely. I REALLY let go of the old version and that fact that I have 300 or 500 pages sitting there. It’s a very hard thing to do, but it’s a critical step. I do this if, for example, I think I need to write in first person instead of third, or if I believe a completely different structure is called for.
  2. As I am writing the NEW first chapter, I open the old document and have it up on my screen. I am not allowed to go into the old document to poach a description or a bit of dialogue or even, say, a whole battle scene, but EVERY time I do so, I MUST make sure that it fits within the NEW material. It’s not an automatic “pick up and drop.” I pick it up, drop it in, then evaluate it. I actually make it a whole separate color. I highlight the poached section in yellow in order to flag it and make sure that I didn’t drag in any vestiges of the old way. You will probably find that you get to use a lot of your existing material. But you must do so with a sense that you are FILTERING it – otherwise, you end up with all the problems of the original version and what you do, in effect, is create a WORSE story because it has the old problems, it has problems with meshing the old and the new, and it probably has a few new problems.

Once I have a complete draft and it hangs together, the revision process looks like this:

  1. I try to identify what, exactly, this story is about. I know it seems crazy that I wouldn't know when I started, but I don't. I mean, I know vaguely. I have an idea. But I don't know it in my bones, and I must know it in my bones in order to make it really sing. So I ask myself, What is this story really about? What am I trying to say about the world? Once I have the answers, I go in and get rid of anything that doesn't serve the story.
  2. Next I look for places where I can let the writing breathe. So many times when you're following a plot or an outline in your head, the writing gets cramped and utilitarian. You need to pull it apart, give it room, let things unfold. This is the true meaning of "show, don't tell." They're not talking about showing the weather and the grimace on someone's face. They're talking about showing how things came to be the way they are. They're talking about letting the reading in. Note that for both steps #1 and #2, I often use a foam core board and Post-It notes to make a giant map of the story. There's something about making it visual that really helps at this stage.
  3. The fun part of revision – the reason so many writers rave about the process of revision – is that you start seeing connections and threads that you never saw before. Things start making sense. You start realize how darn SMART you were to put a dog in, or to start with a history of thermodynamics. I always feel very powerful  doing a revision. I am, after all, the god of my story.