1. Part I: Care to Revise Your Story? Introduction
2. Novel Workshop: Testing Your Idea

Have you ever written a story with a couple of solid characters, maybe three but not four, a solid story premise and, maybe, a truly heartbreaker of an ending, only to find yourself holding on to sixteen stuffy pages? Maybe your story is too insulated against the outside world. Maybe you need to open up some windows and let in the street noise.

Writing a story is one of the most difficult things to do well. Revising your story--that's hard, too. But letting in the sunlight to a tightly wound narrative might be the hardest task of all.

In Part I: Care to Revise Your Story? I unpacked the barebones of a story revision strategy taught by my professor, Pam Painter. You've sliced, diced and reconstituted your first draft . You've let go of your little plot secrets and given your readers the information they need to know. You've admitted that your story was a little flabby and burned off the unsightly, distracting love handles. Finally, you reorganized the narrative and re-typed the whole shmeer.

Now you need to let your story breathe. It has the bones and tendon to hold the world together. Now it needs oxygen. It needs blood.

How many times in your story does your main character make use of his imagination? How many times, when driving to work, do YOU make use of your imagination? Why do you get to daydream but your characters do not?

How many times do your characters receive phone calls? How many times are those calls wrong numbers?

When your character crosses the street, does she ever have to wait for that guy in the Wrangler who decides to make a left turn at the last possible second? Are there cars in the streets at all?

Do your characters ever watch the news?

These are questions you should take directly to your characters. Ask your characters everything. During the first few drafts that you write, you'll start to feel like you know you characters fairly well. Now that you've been introduced to them, take them out for beers and grill them with every question under the sun. Get to know them better than they know themselves. Try asking them in a chilly voice, "Billy, why are you such a terrible son?" Does he get angry? Does he look confused? Or does he pour out his guts all over the bar? In your story, you might let him get away with a shrug--but when you're getting to know him, you can't cut him any slack.

All right, here's the tricky part: as you're getting to the true gristle of what it means to be one of your characters, you need to find ways of letting his quirks mix with the real world. My professor calls the following items by the name "inserts." Once you've completed one or two drafts of your story, let your third story revision focus on inserting new life into the narrative. This won't be easy. Your narrative will resist the outside world as if these inserts were infections. Every narrative wants to explains something, and every draft of a narrative strives to drive that explanation home. Therefore, when you try teach your story some new tricks, the old dog will bite. Don't forget that you're the writer. You have some say over what happens on these pages.

These are some inserts collected and designed by Pam Painter:

1. "As a child, I [main character] learned . . ."
2. "Last night I had a reoccurring dream about . . ."
3. "Five years from now, I'll probably . . ."
4. "They were probably saying ______ about me . . ."
5. "My to-do list, top 5 . . ."
6. "Secretly, I collected . . ."
7. "The telephone rang. It was a wrong number, but the caller refused to hang up . . ."
8. "The one thing I couldn't say was ______"
9. "As for God, I . . . "
10. "The smell of ______ brought back . . . "
11. "Suddenly, I remembered that I had forgotten . . . "
12. My mother never . . . "

Before writing another draft, plan on revising your story with at least five inserts. Yes. Five. Only, don't decide which inserts to add with your revision--not quite yet. Dust off a pad of paper, and use these questions to interview your characters. Write the answers in your trusty notebook, then review what you've written. You're looking for inserts that reveal startling depth, clear insight into the soul of your character. You're looking for the cause and effect, the interactions and relationships your character establishes with the outside world.

Choose at least five, then stick 'em in to your story revision. Don't just throw 'em in, you have to make them stick. If that means more revision, then you should feel good about yourself. You've given yourself the focus you need to revise, and revise again. A fellow MFA-er of mine likes to say, "These muffs couldn't write their way out of a paper bag." Can you?

1. Part I: Care to Revise Your Story? Introduction
2. Novel Workshop: Testing Your Idea

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog