So one of the things I wanted to learn at Clarion is the art of revision. And boy howdy, have I! So in the interests of sharing some of the stuff I’ve learned personally, let me share some – some – of the lessons I’ve learned.

This is not a comprehensive guide by any means. Clarion is a high-information place, and I could write a blog post every hour on the things we learned in the past sixty minutes. When you’re sharing and reading and critiquing 24/7, waking up spontaneously at five in the morning because your brain is churning with ideas and OMG THAT’S THE PLOT I’M LOOKING FOR, it’s hard to really relate everything that's happening here. So please be clear that this isn't the list; I’m just pulling out some of the things that stick in my mind as common things we’ve found as Things To Be Revised.

They might not even be the most useful lessons, or the most common. Just the things that stick in my mind come midnight.

Revisions Are Brutal.
That entire middle third of my story? I just threw it out. There’s now this seven-page hole in the center, and I have to fill it with something else.

That ending? Cut the last three pages and rewrite them from scratch.

The first seven pages can go. Not interesting.

The true revisions are where you look your story in the eye and ask, “Is this section pulling its weight?” And sometimes you have to rip out 2,000-word chunks because it doesn’t provide the emotional kick you need – you can’t retool it to provide that charge, because it’s the wrong scene. Worse, you must find the right scene to present the information you do need.

The rest of the tips involve finding those dead areas, at least as I’ve learned some of it in the past ten days. In the past, I’ve done surgery gently – a sentence here, a word there. I’m realizing that the dead areas are often really, really huge and have to be excised with a steamshovel.

Be prepared to lose everything. No, r eally.

Do Not Drive To The Story.
I will refer you here to my infamous “ham sandwich” rule, which posits that every reader of your story is ravenous for a ham sandwich. At the end of every sentence, the reader will go, “Wow, that’s nice. Is it better than a ham sandwich?”

Unless you can distract him sufficiently with every line, he will leave the room immediately and you will never see him again, except maybe at the deli.

A lot of stories take four or five or even ten pages to really catch fire. And when they catch fire is the moment where they start dealing with the stuff that only this story can tell.

Three guys wandering around in the woods isn’t particularly interesting; we’ve seen that before. Three guys exchanging backstories in the woods? Even less so. What you’re trying to do as a writer is set it up so that when we discover that this is not the woods, but rather the gullet of the horrendous Leaf Dragon, whose intestines are furred with sap, we will be shocked.

Got news for you: We’ll never get to the damn dragon, because we’ll be down at the deli. So you’d better find a way to lead with the dragon, or at least something that is only something the dragon being in this story can provide… And once we’ve got that hook, once we know why we’re here, then we’ll endure hearing about the guys in the forest.

We wanna know up front why we should care. Check your story to find where that first interesting bit comes in. So find the most unique detail in your story and, barring spoilers, try to put it as close to the top as possible. Generally, that actually makes the story chug along a lot more quickly. Remember, shuffle the backstories to, well, the back.

Active Characters Are More Interesting Than Passive Characters.
Kelly Link turned the light on for me by talking about serial killers.

“They do sick things,” she said. “But people want to read about them, because they choose their actions, and that’s fascinating. It’s way better to have a character actively making a bad choice than to passively make a good one.”

And she’s right. A large failure of many of my stories is that I tend to have characters who resist the challenges facing them, because they’re in a miserable world and they don’t want to make an ugly choice. So I have people whining, and what I need to do is reengineer the entire story so instead of going, “I don’t want to be in Sewage Land,” I’m writing a character who thinks Sewage Land is awesome, it’s great, he totally owns this wretched area and finds something to love.

See? Right now, you’re going, “Who the fuck would want to live in Sewage Land?” And that’s the hook, man. You wanna know more about this guy, because he’s so not you.

Any time you can have a character striving for something instead of complaining about something, do so.

Every Major Character Needs A Character Arc.
Answer this question:

“How is this character different at the end of the story than s/he was at the beginning?”

If the answer is, “Not much,” then you’ve failed.

Now, that’s elementary writing, natch. Taught in every Writing 101 class. But once you get to be a certain level of talent, the kind where you can write clever prose and plot away with the best of them and wit the hell out of that dialogue, you can forget about (or minimize) that creamy center.

Congratulations! You’re now good enough to dazzle your pals with bullshit frippery. But without the emotional center, none of the rest matters.

So look at your central character(s), and really ask the hard questions about what’s at stake for them. How does this story change them? That’s what’s important, and if you can’t answer that question you are failing.

A knight who saves fair princesses? You can gussy that up with a lot of clever plots and action sequences and witty dialogue, and people might buy it… But a few weeks later, they’ll have forgotten because there’s nothing to hang anything on. It was just this guy doing cool stuff.

You have to give the knight some reason, some stake, why his life is going to suck if he doesn’t save this princess. Or why his life will suck if he does. Then the knight starts mattering, and the story pulls together.

Now here comes the second part: Now that you know what he wants, how do you bring that out?

A lot of my takes on stories here have been in the vein of oh, that’s neat, I wanted more of that. Once you really determine what’s at stake, then you need to follow the line of the thread through your plot and amplify those moments that best show what is at stake.

...Which often involves trimming whole subplots. This is good. This is what it’s for. The less stuff you have floating around to obscure the real heart of it, the better. Ideally, everything would line up to illuminate that central dilemma.

Plot Is Fucking Irrelevant.
You know what convinced me plot was irrelevant? The Maltese Falcon. Because I’ll be honest and say I have no fucking clue what happened in that movie. The deep mystery completely lost me.

But I do remember Bogey at the end, turning in the woman he loves into the cops because it’s the right thing to do. All those clever plot twists? Blown away in the wind of that emotion.

What matters is that you emphasize what’s important to the characters. A lot of manuscripts (my own, more than anyone else’s!) had these missing scenes where something big happened, and we cut away from the aftermath of the people involved because OH HAI PLOT POINT LEAVING AT 11, CAN’T MISS IT.

Stick around a little. Write that scene afterwards, the one where we see why this big plot twist mattered. Because for all the bombast and clamor and big twisty stuff in Return of the Jedi, you know what everyone remembers?

That one little Ewok. Crying for its friend.

In the middle of the biggest battle for the fate of the universe, we’re taking time to mourn for some irrelevant little fleabag. Why? Because we connect with it way more than we do with plot.

Overexplain A Little. No, Really.
The number one criticism I have given time and time again is, “I’m not sure what’s happening here…” And yes, it makes me feel a little dense to say it, but then the other students often chime in and say, “Yeah, this didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either. I wanted to know, I just felt like I didn't have the tools here.”

As the poor writers we are, we have two amazing anti-tricks in our arsenal: We haven’t thought it through, and our reader will understand.

If you’ve just handwaved some plot point, well, we’ll generally get confused. If you say magic only works through wands in Scene One, and in Scene Two we see a guy flying around with wings, we’re going to go, “Wait, what is that? I don’t get it.”

Likewise, your reader will not understand your clever bits. Err on the side of overwriting, rather than underwriting. As Gra says, “It’s a lot easier to pare back,” and yes, you do run the risk of overexplaining, and certainly some writers are prone to exposition…. But I think you’ll be surprised at how deep you get in your head when you’re writing. The characters are clear to you, but take a second to make them a little clearer to someone else, because here’s the biggest truth:

Readers don’t give much of a shit.

As critiquers, we read all the manuscripts twice, or try to. Your reader? Maybe once. If you’re lucky. And she’s not paying nearly as much attention as you are. She’s aching for that ham sandwich, remember?

It’s not that she’s not interested. But her investment? Not the same as yours. She hasn’t noted way back on page 8 that Vivian Von Vondekloofer had gray hair, and hence clearly thanks to her tremors she has arsenic poisoning! No, really, you’re lucky if they remember Vivian has gray hair.

Hand-hold a little. And look for opportunities to repeat and amplify the relevant themes as much as you can.

Reduce the NPCs.
If you have a lot of characters, lemme tell you: It’s hard to hold the ongoing motivations of more than four people in any given piece. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but good areas for revision often involve things like collapsing two buddies into one buddy, or taking three characters who tell the lead character three separate things and condensing it into one knowledgeable guy.

Every NPC should pull his or her weight.

When In Doubt, Go Home.
Jim Kelly taught me that the character’s home is inherently interesting. Where do they live? What does Fred The Spaceman do for fun when he’s not jaunting between the stars? What kind of place does he relax in? There's no better way than finding out what's important to someone than showing us what he puts in the place he lives.

The process of revision involves teasing out the stuff that only you can do. We have a million spacemen running amuck. But spaceman homes? Not so many. Let’s make it real by showing his little spaceman socks on his spaceman toaster rack.

If you don’t know what to do with a scene, just go home. See what happens there. Don’t go for plot, just hang with ‘em for a while and see what they’re like when they’re off-camera. Often, they’re more interesting that way anyway.

All right, that’s it. Going to bed. Love to y’all writers.

(Tell me I'm full of it)