Revising

[caecilia]

Sorry if this is too rambly. I'm in a university Fiction workshop, and I have absolutely loathed my story from day one. My biggest problem is that it has no plot. I've always felt that if I'm not feeling something, I turn the page in my notebook open a new tab in Scrivener and start from square one. I usually do this several times when I'm starting a story (and in fact, the "first draft" that I submitted is technically a third draft). But for the purposes of this class, my story has to very clearly be a revised version of the first draft, and not an "entirely unrelated" story. Personally, I'm not sure how anyone can tell that, since little changes add up and the story is meant to evolve. For my second draft, I started from the beginning and wrote basically the same thing but with a change in tone and style. I was thinking for my third draft, I could start with putting my characters in a different situation and have something happen to them, but now I'm not sure if that will be "too different".

My professor's comments on my second draft say that I need to flesh it out, but I'm struggling with how to go about this (and it's not my prof's job to walk me through it), and honestly my workshop group is really unhelpful.

So, I'm turning to you guys (as well as e-mailing the prof). What is your revising process like? When a story just isn't working, is there any way to revive it without doing a complete re-write? Do you always have to start from scratch like I do, or is there a better process for going through piece by piece and transforming the story? Specifically, have you ever written something completely void of action and had to somehow inject the plot into what you already wrote? I often go back while I'm writing and tweak/add/move little details around, but I'm at a loss at how to do this with something that's been sitting for a while, without, y'know. Starting over.

Comments

[sarillia]

I have almost no experience with revising (I've edited a total of two short stories for public consumption) but I often realize in the middle of writing that I don't like the direction the story is going in. That's when I stop and ask myself a bunch of questions.

*What do I like about the story and want to keep?
*What is the overarching conflict that takes me from beginning to end?
*If I somehow got to the writing stage and didn't have that, then this is when I figure that out based on the characters and the world
*How does the main character change over the course of the story?

I'm sure there are others but those are the main ones that I can think of off the top of my head.

After I answer these questions I look over the answers and really question how much I like what I came up with. If any of it sounds like I'll be bored writing it then I scrap it and come up with something else.

I don't know if you could do this and come up with something that's not completely different, but if you want to try to do that then you should try to find some things that you like about what you've written and emphasize those parts.

[caecilia]

Thanks for this! I think I do something similar, but I often have to step away from writing for a while and daydream a bit.

If any of it sounds like I'll be bored writing it then I scrap it and come up with something else. Yup, that's usually what I end up doing! However, I've had so many ideas over the years, whether they're specific images like "A giant eyeball that flies around the sky and brings good luck" or general themes like "A story about how humans interact with the universe", and they usually pop up again and again in different stories. Like "Okay, I didn't know what to do with this back then, but maybe I can make it work here." So even when I start from scratch, I'm drawing on things I've written in the past. My problem with this particular draft, I think, is that I hate it, and I have other, more interesting ideas that I'd rather be writing.

But this is helpful. I think I'll go through my draft with a purple pen and pick out what I want to keep, and then embellish on those aspects. Thanks!