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

[lunabee34]

I would think of plot in terms of conflict. What's the central conflict of your story?

The characters don't actually have to go anywhere or do anything other than talk to each other. I've been in workshops before where students were given a template and asked to fill it in. For example: two people enter a room, they sit on the couch, one of them cries and the other one leaves. That's what happens but it's not the story. If that makes sense.

Maybe you could think about revision at the dialogue level.