Nobody writes great fiction straight away.
I’m not just talking about new writers, either. Established professionals also need to revise their writing, often multiple times, before it does what they want.
Today, we’re going to talk about revision. What is it? How do you do it? When do you do it? How do you know when you’re done? Why revise at all? Isn’t it better to just finish a story, send it out, and start on a new one? Why hasn’t anyone sent me ten million dollars for my Great American Novel yet?
So many questions!
Why Heinlein’s 5 Rules for Writers Aren’t Great
If you’re a beginning writer — and especially if you’re writing science fiction — chances are good that at some point somebody has talked to you about Heinlein’s Rules for Writers.
If you haven’t run into these before, Heinlein’s Rules are five steps that writers can follow to make sure they are commercially successful. Here they are:
- You must write.
- You must finish what you write.
- You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
- You must put the work on the market.
- You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
On the face of it, these rules seem pretty straightforward.
Obviously if you want to sell a story to a magazine somewhere, you do—at some point—need to actually write that story, finish it, and submit it. Likewise, if you stop submitting after your first rejection, you’re not going to sell very many stories unless you’re very lucky and very skilled.
Unfortunately, some people insist that you have to adhere to these rules completely if you want to be a success at all. Personally, I think that’s a mistake.
There’s a great article by Charlie Jane Anders that covers this topic, with quotes from Patricia C. Wrede — two writers I greatly admire!
Anders suggests that the main problem with Heinlein’s Rules is rule number three: “You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.”
It may not be shocking, given that I spent most of a blog post talking about how there’s no One True Way to Write, but I agree completely with Anders on this point.
I think “refrain from rewriting” as a fixed rule is a terrible idea.
It might have worked well for Heinlein, but in my experience you’re going to miss out on a lot of opportunities for growth and opportunities for actually selling your stories if you never rewrite anything until after it’s sold.
That goes double for newer writers, who may still be figuring out what they want their writing to do. (I’ve been writing since 2008 and I’m still not certain.)
There are two aspects to the “no rewriting” rule that are worth pulling out further.
Is Revision Rewriting?
First, what does “rewrite” mean, exactly? Is it the same as revision, or is it something different?
“Don’t rewrite” doesn’t, in my opinion, mean you shouldn’t revise a story before you consider it finished.
Revision is an important part of the writing process that turns a first draft — and we remember Hemingway’s apocryphal quote about the quality of first drafts, I hope — into a polished, effective piece of storytelling.
Based on the rest of this so-called ‘rule,’ what Heinlein actually means here is that after you’ve written, revised, and otherwise ‘finished’ a story, you should start submitting and refrain from editing it ever again until and unless an editor offers to buy it if you make specific changes.
That’s very different from saying “revision is bad; don’t do it!”
But…
Why Rewriting can be Good
Icon by Nhor, used under a CC-BY license.
I actually disagree that rewriting is bad, also.
Revision is an important part of “finishing” a story for me. But is a story ever really finished?
Sometimes, I’ve looked at a story after I’ve sent it out to every pro-paying market and thought, “Wow, no wonder nobody’s buying this. I need to make [obvious change]!”
It sucks to realize that only after you’ve used up your chances at publication, let me tell you.
Once I even found that I had inadvertently been submitting a story with all my italics deleted. Yikes!
Personally, I think distance from your story’s first draft makes revision much easier. If you can get that distance before you start submitting, great! If not, and you send the story to a few places before you sit down and figure out why it isn’t working, that’s also great.
An approach that works for me is to read through each story every few rejections and see if I still think the story works. If it doesn’t, I’ll sit down and revise it. If I still think it works, I put the lack of success down to a mismatch in editorial and authorial tastes and keep on submitting. (We’ll talk more about this in another post.)
If I get a personal rejection from an editor, I’ll do the same thing.
Do I always rewrite when I get a reject? No way. Who has the time?
Can an obsessive focus on rewriting stimy your writing career? Sure.
But putting forth “never rewrite” as a rule is misguided and every bit as harmful to your growth as a writer as obsessive tinkering is.
Why Revision Matters
There are two reasons why revision is important in my approach to writing. I think these reasons should hold true for most people, but it’s possible they don’t!
- It’s hard for me to get the ideas in my head onto the page coherently
- It’s hard for me to see the words on the page properly, because of the ideas in my head
In other words, writing is — for me — partly a process of reconciling ideas I thought were brilliant with the dreck that ends up on the page in my first drafts.
That isn’t always true. Sometimes I’m quite happy with stories after a single draft — even more rarely, I can sell them without doing more than fixing typos. These happy circumstances are few and far between, however. In almost all cases, a story I’m ready to submit is a story that’s gone through several rounds of revision.
The flip side of this, as Charlie Jane Anders points out in her discussion of Heinlein’s rules, is that building revision into your writing process gives you way more freedom in your first drafts.
If you only ever let yourself write a first draft and then submit it, you’re putting yourself under immense pressure to get everything perfect (or at least “good enough”) straight away. Not only is that very, very difficult, immense pressure does not lend itself to writing well or to finding joy and satisfaction in writing.
At least for me, I’m much more willing to experiment and innovate, and much more likely to be happy with stories I’ve written, if I give myself permission to write things that are confusing, obscure, or just plain purple as I work on a new story. The reason I can give myself that permission is because I know I’m going to go in later and revise, making the confusing stuff clear, the obscure stuff apparent, and the purple stuff more readable. (In the interests of full disclosure, I like purple prose as much as the next writer. It has its uses!)
The second item in the list above is similar to the first, but subtly different.
I want to get my ideas down, and I struggle with that. But what I also struggle with is figuring out if I’ve actually managed to get my ideas down.
Think of the expression, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.”
This is kind of the opposite.
When I have an idea in my head of how a story goes, why a character does what they are doing, how the rules of a specific setting work, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell whether other people will be able to figure that out from what I’ve written down.
I know what the big picture (the forest) is, so I can easily see it when I look at the text on the page (the trees). Other readers, however, may just see ten specific trees, metaphorically speaking, planted in a confusing pattern.
Revision is where I make sure to put my signposts that say “Hey, reader, this is a forest!”
This second item also ties into my next revision practice: waiting a while.
Waiting before you revise
Back in this post about writing flash fiction, I gave you an assignment to write a complete short story of 500 to 1,000 words long.
The second part of that assignment was a little counter-intuitive. I also asked you to not submit it yet.
If you were wondering “What the heck?” about that, here’s the other shoe, ready to drop.
Distance from your story’s first draft makes revision much easier.
For me, it’s hard to break away from my idea of the story and see what I’ve actually written down until I’ve taken a break from the story.
While I do revise things as soon as I’m done writing the draft (or the second draft, or the third draft), I’ve also found I have a lot more success at telling effective stories if I wait a few weeks and then take one final revision pass before I start submitting to magazines.
That distance helps me read the words on the page with a more critical eye, because I’m just seeing what’s written down, rather than the ideas I had when I thought up the story in the first place. I’m much more likely to notice when I’ve introduced a character poorly, been vague about important setting details, or skipped over something that was obvious to me but not to readers.
Short version: by letting a story rest for a while before you decide it’s ‘finished,’ you can judge its merits and flaws a little more objectively.
My revision process
The revision process is going to differ for every writer. You don’t have to follow mine!
That said, this is what I do when I sit down to revise a short story:
- Print out the story
- Read through the story
- Write revisions on the printout
- Type up the revisions
Many other writers stick to a computer the whole time, and that’s fine too, obviously. Not everyone has a printer, and paper does get expensive if you’re doing a lot of revision.
My revision process is messy. I sometimes end up moving whole sections and crossing out large chunks of scenes, writing in half-sentences and deleting others. For me, it’s easier to do that on paper than it is on a screen, but your mileage may vary!
Some other tricks for revision that I see thrown around include changing the font in your word processor to trick your brain into reading what’s there instead of what you think you wrote and reading the story aloud.
If you’re just starting on your writing journey, I’d encourage you to try different things until you find a process that works for you.
How do you tell when is a story ‘finished’?
Honestly, it’s difficult to tell when a story’s finished and ready to submit.
I usually see two answers to this question. One is a punchline, and the other is of questionable use.
How do you know when a story’s finished?
- When it sells. (womp womp)
- When your revisions are just changing it instead of improving it.
That joke answer is, honestly, the only way I can tell for certain. If an editor’s purchased a story, I’m done! Usually. Most of the time.
The second answer is good if you have enough experience with revision to know when changes you’re making aren’t actually improving the story.
But if you’re new to revision, or if — like me — you have trouble seeing what’s on the page and what’s in your head, it can be difficult to tell if a change is improving the story or not, so it doesn’t really solve the problem so much as restate it.
Oscar Wilde has a witty epigram about this, though, reported in Robert Sherard’s biography, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship:
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon — well, I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
If your ‘revision’ is just messing with commas, it’s probably time to let the story go out into the wide, wide world.
Otherwise, you just have to give the story a rest, read through it, and see if it does what you want it to.
Another important step in revision — especially if you’re new to writing — is getting feedback from someone who isn’t you. I’ll talk more about that in another post, when we learn about giving and receiving critiques.
For now, let’s finish up with our assignment!
Assignment: Revise your story!
This week’s assignment is pretty straightforward:
- Read the 500-1000 word story you wrote earlier (or some other completed story draft).
- Revise it!
It might be that after reading the story, you think it’s already good enough. Usually, I’d be down with that. For the purposes of this assignment, though, try to find something you can improve.
Look for things that are confusing. Descriptions that are redundant. Dialogue that isn’t as clever or convincing as it could be. Ask yourself, as you read, if your goal for the story was met by its end.
What you revise and what your revision process look like is up to you, but at the end of completing this assignment, you should have a revised piece of flash fiction.
Got there already? Nicely done, writer!
But don’t rest on those laurels just yet. Now that your revisions are made, next week we’re going to learn about sending that story out to some other writers to see what they think of it.