Radical revision strategies

Adapted from a worksheet accompanying a short lecture in one of the classes I TA.

Got a class assignment you’d like to recycle creatively, a response to a writing prompt that you’re not sure where to go with, or a rough draft you want to look at with fresh eyes? These strategies are meant to be a sort of mad science lab for your story: take it apart and put it back together, or put the brain in a different body, or give it a radioactive spider bite. 

Braid/Rebraid. This works best for stories that are already segmented somehow–such as a series of vignettes, a story told in multiple perspectives, or one that has clearly defined past and present moments.

  1. Break your draft into pieces. If it’s already in sections, break them into paragraphs. If there aren’t many paragraphs, break them into sentences.  
  2. Reorder the pieces. You could try putting all the first paragraphs together, all the second paragraphs together, and so on. You could shuffle them like cards, move every third line to the back, organize them by length of sentence, or arrange them in alphabetical order.
  3. Read the new work you have created. It probably doesn’t make perfect sense, but it likely has some new senses and meanings–maybe a theme or a repetition you didn’t intentionally include. Build on that. Try to make it make sense.
  4. Don’t put the sentences back in the exact same order they were before.

Change of perspective. Rewrite your draft from a different perspective. This could mean: changing from 1st person to 2nd or 3rd person and vice versa, or retelling the story from the point of view of a different character (or the same character, but at a different point in time). 

Hermit Crab. What objects or documents play an important role in your draft, or would make an appropriate accessory to it? Examples: a letter, texts, emails, instructions, recipe, lists, playlist, catalog, inventory, tickets, horoscopes. Rewrite your story in the shape of one of those documents. 

Word replacement. From Kathy Fish’s newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction. As she says:
“The word choices you’ve made in the first draft will tend to be automatic ones. Go-to descriptions and cliches. Creating a word bank for a first or second draft is revelatory and enriching. You may feel you have cracked your story open to something new you hadn’t planned on.”

  1. Create a word bank for your draft: copy out all the words that convey significant images, actions, feelings. 
  2. Now, allow yourself to free associate and branch out. Add more words, idioms, phrases to your word bank.
  3. Discover the diction that best serves and enlivens your story. In some cases, this will lead you to make substitutions. You’ll discover more precise words. Specifics to replace generalities. Sensory details will emerge you hadn’t thought of before and want to include. And these details will often reveal an emotional layer to your story that wasn’t there before. 

Ann de Forest’s Method for turning essays into poems:

  1. Identify the core image or idea that drives the essay.
  2. Find any sonic, rhythmic, or visual links that recur in your essay. 
  3. Compress or condense: if you had to convey a 1,000 word essay in 250 words, which are the most important?
  4. Remove transitions and other superfluity. 

Amy Beth Sisson’s Method for turning poems into essays (choose any of the following):

  • Braided essays: thread multiple ideas together in alternating paragraphs 
  • Collage: juxtapose or layer ideas
  • Engage a reader in an exploration of the writer’s thinking. Spiral out from the kernel of a poem.
  • Expand time: if a poem captures a moment, an essay can dip into the past and future.
  • Leap into the unforeseen!
  • Leave room for co-creation between reader and writer.

More from de Forest and Sisson at Brevity blog.

Activity: 

  1. Choose your medium: a response to a writing prompt? an entry in your daybook? some of your own work?
  2. Choose one of the methods above that best suits your medium. 
  3. Take some time to do the grunt work. e.g. copy and paste paragraphs in a different order; find and replace pronouns; create a bank of words, ideas, and images from and inspired by your first draft. 
  4. Now take some time to revise, rewrite, and recreate. 

Reflection questions

  1. Why did you decide to revise the draft you chose for this workshop? What about it felt unfinished or in need of revision, in your opinion?
  2. What drew you to the revision strategy you chose? 
  3. How did changing the format or content of your first draft change its meaning? 
  4. Did you discover anything or find anything surprising in this process?
  5. What will you do next to continue revising this piece?