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

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 vanished in a wasteland of false starts, dead ends and dead darlings.

Why? What happened?

You’re the author — but right now you’re so bummed out and so frustrated, you’re the last to know where you went wrong. You’ve worked so hard and for so long 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?

Nope. Forget it. Won’t help. Or at least, not yet.

You’re stranded in the wasteland of a mess you yourself created 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 bestseller, November Road. He discussed the difference between wrong and hard in an 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.”

Most of us have been where Lou was. Maybe even more than once, but this time feels like the worst. This time, the wheels have come off.

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

And 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. Way back when.

Now you’re lost it and you’re miserable.

So was Lou Berney.

Radical revision from broken book to bestseller.

After working hard on his new book, only to feel frustrated 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 created 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 DOA 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 you have — even though it’s the worst thing you ever wrote. The absolute bottom. A total disaster.

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 for radical revision: back off, loosen up and have fun.

Go wild. Let ‘er rip. Radical revision will free you.

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, whackiest, craziest ideas you can think of. Don’t prejudge. Turn them over in your mind and let them marinate. 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 nut cases, and weird, can-you-believe-this? stories. Look for inspiration in the most off-the-wall 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 double 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.

Don’t forget: 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 could even 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 battered ego and stalled epic.

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

• Write the scene from another character’s POV.
• Or 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.
• Or maybe a coma would be better?
• Get them laid. Good sex, bad sex, funny sex, mercy sex. Doesn’t matter as long as it helps 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.

• Turn Yolanda Yawn into a fire-breathing b*tch.
• 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 decide 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/girl into the bad guy/girl villain.
• Or vice versa.

Too good to be true. Or not.

• She’s your MC, she’s a princess, kind, beautiful, generous, marries a handsome prince and lives HEA. Yep a fairy tale. Classic but definitely 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 decrepit shack or a haunted castle?

Too many characters?

• Here’s a minefield: Don’t confuse the reader (or yourself???) 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. Poof! Gone! Just like that! (But stash them in an RIP file because you never know when they might come in handy in another book.)
• Bottom line: Get rid of the clutter, and you’ll feel a lot better. Really.

Change a setting:

• From a fly-specked rust belt diner to a glistening farm-to-table organic feeding station in a distant galaxy.
• From a warm, sunny Caribbean singles resort to a cold, gloomy Arctic research station.
• Or the center of ever-so-chic Paris moves to a filthy, disease-ridden slum somewhere in this world or another.
• From a Park Avenue penthouse to a backwoods outhouse. (OK, just kidding, but you get the idea.)

Change the chronology.

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

Bottom line: think different.

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