Radical Revision: When The Going Gets Tough, Writers Get Radical

Radical revision may be what that broken WIP needs.

 by Ruth Harris

The lights are red. All signs are Stop Signs.

That stack of pages you thought was going to be a book? You know, with characters, a setting, maybe even a plot? Somehow, it’s been lost in a desert of false starts, dead ends and dead darlings.

Why? What happened?

You’re only the author—so right now you’re the last to know where you went wrong. You’ve worked so hard and for so long that you’ve lost all perspective.

Still, you do know you’re nowhere near the stage where even the savviest crit group or genius editor can bail you out.

How about you fix grammar, cut adverbs, and/or replace weak words with stronger words? Won’t that gloss your book to a high polish? Forget it. Won’t help. Or at least, not yet.

You’re in the middle of a mess with, you’re convinced, no way out.

You are not alone.

Noted mystery author Lou Berney faced the same dilemma when he was writing the first draft of his new bestseller, November Road. He discussed the difference between wrong and hard in an extensive interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“For the first five or so months I worked on my novel, I just thought it was going to be hard. I’m used to hard. Most writers are. You put your head down, keep working, and gut it out. But the more I kept working, it was like trying to play through the pain of a ruptured appendix. It was like trying to dig yourself out of a grave.”

We’ve all been where Lou was. Maybe even more than once, but this time feels like the worst. You feel the wheels have come off.

You’re tearing your hair, weeping buckets, cursing the fates—and anyone who crosses your path.

You don’t know where you’ve gone wrong, much less how to fix it.

You thought you had a great idea, but that was once upon a time. Now you’re miserable.

So was Lou Berney.

Radical revision can take you from broken book to bestseller.

After working hard, only to fail again and again, Lou eventually realized he had chosen the wrong MC. When he went radical and turned the MC into the antagonist, new ideas grew life. He was able to create a new MC with a defined character arc and, armed with the results of his radical reinvention, new avenues opened up and he was able to reimagine the story.

The book that had been causing Lou so much misery, came alive.

Let your creativity come to the rescue.

I’m talking about working with what we have—even though it’s the worst thing you ever wrote. Or at least you feel that way.

Now, when things look their darkest, when you feel completely stalled, when you think you will never finish your #%$^ book and wonder why you even started it, is not the time to give up.

Now, when you feel your worst, is the time to go radical: back off, loosen up and have fun.

Go wild. Let ‘er rip.

The point of radical revision is to free yourself from the infinite loop of dead ends and false starts in which you’re trapped. Here are just a few thoughts about ways to rid yourself of stale thinking and get you started—

• Make a list of the dumbest, wackiest, craziest ideas you can think of. Don’t prejudge. Turn them over in your mind. Sleep on them. Talk about them to writer friends or, in fact, to anyone who will listen. See where they lead.
• Scroll through Twitter, pick up a newspaper or turn on the news for an almost infinite source of outrageous doings, whacko ideas, and weird, can-you-believe-this? stories. Look for inspiration in the nuttiest comments from vote-whoring politicians or ego-addled narcissistic “celebrities.”
• If you’re so down in the dumps, you still can’t think of anything, steal a plot or character from your favorite book, movie or tv show—and then turn it on its head and change it.
• Or, maybe even better, steal from a movie or tv show you hate watch because anger is a great motivator.
• Have a douible espresso or a glass of wine and brainstorm with your long-suffering spouse/partner/best friend.
• Rummage through the plot capsules and reviews at IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes for more ideas.

Then, with some ammunition at hand, rethink your book.

As always, duplicate your documents before you start to tinker (or blast away.)

Reuse, Recycle, Reimagine.

If parts of your book work, save them and, like a good cook facing a fridge full of leftovers, think about how you can use them as a basis for reinvention or even creating a new book.

Delete the story line/chapter/scenes that drag you down and, with your crazy new ideas in mind, go to work on the parts that currently don’t work but may well have promise.

It might be much less traumatic than you think.

In fact, you might actually have a good time.

The point of radical revision is to get out of your own way and put the fun and excitement back into your stalled epic.

The chapter (or scene) that doesn’t work.

• Write the scene from another character’s POV.
• View a dinner party scene from the POV of a spilled glass of wine.
• Write a baseball scene from the POV of the catcher’s glove.
• Find the point of the scene (there is one, isn’t there?) and flip it.
• Play with tone, voice and plot point and see what you come up with.
• Throw in a joke.
• Kill someone.
• Put them in a wheelchair.
• Maybe a coma would be better?
• Get them laid. Good sex, bad sex, funny sex, mercy sex. Doesn’t matter as long as you hack a way out of your dead end.
• If worse comes to worse, and the chapter doesn’t work no matter how hard you try and how much time you put into fixing it, consider deleting it. I did that once—I simply deleted the whole damn thing (with lots of trepidation) and was amazed that getting rid of that one chapter gave the book the energy it had been missing.
• Consider the possibility that the scene you’ve been struggling with is one you don’t need. Its crucial information (if there is any) can be slipped judiciously into other chapters. At least that’s what happened when, out of desperation, I tried radical surgery on a scene that just wouldn’t come to life.

The boring character.

A personality transplant can come to the rescue:

• Turn Yolanda Yawn into a fire-breathing dragon.
• Give Andy Accountant a superpower. (Get your mind our of the gutter. Or maybe not. Depends on what you’re writing.)
• Make Betty Blah the Vice President (of a big corporation/a country/the church building fund). She’s part of a plot to kill the president. Until she isn’t. Why? Who betrayed her? Did she fall in love with the guy she was planning to kill? Did he fall in love with her? Or did she conclude it was all too much hassle and decided to move to the mountains and start a new life in a log cabin? Then what happened?
• Take a cue from Lou Berney and turn your good guy into the villain.
• Or vice versa

Too good to be true.

• She’s your MC, she’s a princess, kind, beautiful, generous, marries a handsome prince and lives HEA. Yep a fairy tale. Classic but kinda meh, right?
• Start with the beautiful princess, but then what?
• She’s in an accident and loses her looks?
• Does the evil prince next door plot to steal her kingdom?
• Does her rotten step-mother replace her mirror with one that distorts?
• How does she cope with being a plain princess no one would look at once? Never mind twice.
• What about turning her into an ogre who lives in a stolen or haunted castle?

Too many characters?

• Here is a minefield: Don’t confuse the reader with character overload.
• Here is where you must prune, cut, delete, combine.
• Deadbeat David and Billionaire Bob are brothers who don’t have much in common, but when DD develops a rare disease, BB funds research that cures him. Followed by hugs and healing.
• Good but more than a touch predictable, don’t you think?
• Why not combine DD and BB into an only child who rises to the top of her profession despite having a rare disease. How does she overcome the challenges? Does she hide her health issues and what happens if her rival finds out? What if she uses her health issues to get unfair, preferential treatment? Is she faking the disease and just outplaying the guys? And how does her husband/boy friend/best friend/ family react to her amazing success? Admiring? Jealous? Proud? Threatened?
• Or go nuclear and just delete one (or more) extraneous character. You’ll feel a lot better. Really.

Change a setting:

Force your characters to react to new geography and the challenges that come with it.

• A fly-specked rust belt diner to a glistening farm-to-table organic feeding station in a distant galaxy.
• A warm, sunny Caribbean singles resort to a cold, gloomy Arctic research station.
• The center of ever-so-chic Paris to a filthy, disease-ridden slum in Southeast Asia.
• A Park Avenue penthouse to a backwoods out house. (OK, just kidding, but you get the idea.)

Change the chronology.

• Move the conservative 1950s to the go-go 1960’s.
• Or from present-day Montreal to a gold rush frontier town in California in the 1880’s
• Go from 1066 and the creation of the Magna Carta to 1981 and the creation of MTV.
• Or from the front lines and idealism of the Spanish Civil War to the squalor and defiant rage of Vietnam.

Bottom Line: Think Different.

The point of radical revision is to trust your own creativity to force yourself out of the lane in which you’ve been stuck.

Rules are for math, chemistry and pro sports, not writers. You will find that when you set your imagination free, your craziest, wildest, most off-the-wall ideas will often lead the way to the solution.

Think Different worked for Steve Jobs.

Ditto for Einstein and MLK and Pable Picasso.

Also worked for Lou Berney.

Wny not let your creativity work for you, too?

by Ruth Harris (@RuthHarrisBooks) October 28, 2018

What about you, scriveners? Have you ever needed to make radical revisions to your WIP? Have you ever changed the time period (that one intrigues me!) Do you end up with too many characters? Did the radical revisions hurt when you did them, or did they feel satisfying? 

Anne is over at her book blog this week, talking about how Dear Abby and Ann Landers helped spread the Myth of Poisoned Halloween candy

 

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Ruth’s NYT bestseller is now absolutely FREE! 

OPPORTUNITY ALERTS

WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING FALL FLASH FICTION CONTEST $10 ENTRY FEE; CRITIQUE OPTION FOR AN ADDITIONAL $10. Deadline November 30, 2018. The honorable guest judge this season is Literary Agent Heather Flaherty with The Bent Agency. Short fiction of any genre: 250 – 750 words. Reprints and multiple submissions okay. Limit: 300 entries. First Place: $400, publication, interview, and $25 Amazon Gift Certificate. Many great 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th place prizes. Top 10 stories to be published in Women On Writing ezine. Deadline November 30.

SERVICESCAPE SHORT STORY AWARD NO ENTRY FEE. They’re looking for any genre of short fiction. Maximum 5,000 words. Prize is $1000 in addition to publication in SERVICESCAPE. Deadline November 30.

Columbia College Literary Review Editors’ Prize contest. FREE! They’re looking for creative nonfiction or fiction. Up to 5000 words. Prize: $100 and publication in the 2018 edition of CCLR. Deadline December 1.

Bad Dream Horror/Humor Anthology.  They’re looking for original horror fiction with a strong sense of comedy. They discourage old tropes like vampires, zombies & werewolves. 1500-8000 words. Pays 6c a word plus royalties. Deadline Dec. 31^st.

DISQUIET LITERARY PRIZES $15 ENTRY FEE.  Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction categories. Up to 25 pages for prose 10 pages for poetry. The top  fiction winner will be published on Granta.com, the nonfiction winner in Ninthletter.com, and the poetry winner in The Common. The grand prize winner will receive a full scholarship including tuition, lodging, and a $1,000 travel stipend to Lisbon in 2019. Runners-up and other outstanding entrants will receive financial aid. Deadline January 10, 2019.

Don’t let those published short stories stop working! Here are 25 Literary Magazines that will take reprints.