Michael Crichton says “books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It’s one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”

As promised last week, I’m devoting this post to the feared and hated topic of revision and a great approach to revision that I learnt from the University of Iowa course that has now finished. The take-home messages were:

• Writing is only the beginning; where the real work and the real fun of it comes is in the rewriting
• Let time pass between edits – part of writing is not writing
• Build the rewrite in “layers” – focussing on one thing at a time for each edit
• Enjoy the problem-solving – failure leads to mastery – the more problems you solve, the better you get at it

I got really excited about a method for structuring the revision process, which I’m going to call the spine and ribs method. It was proposed by one of the teaching assistants, Christa Fraser. But this is my own adaptation of it, for whose faults no blame attaches to Christa. The method involves two passes, and each is structured as a set of questions. I’ll lay out the questions here. Then I’ll illustrate its use with the revision I made of a story about a shoe shine guy who has an encounter with a mysterious customer.
Pass One

1. What is the “soul” of the piece?
   What are you trying to convey and what concerns were working there of which you were not fully conscious?
2. Who are the main characters and what is the setting here?
3. What are the primary obsessions, preoccupations, desires, fears, obligations, etc. of our characters?

Once you’ve answered these questions, in what ways are these things driving or pulling the narrative forward? These are the long lines or spine of the story

4. What are some of the short lines of narrative tension that are already there?

Now that you have identified the spine of the narrative, are some of the existing short lines of narrative tension now incongruous with the re-aligned story? Are there new short lines, or ribs, that are opening up and wanting to align themselves along the spine of the story?

You revise the piece using these questions. After the story has been realigned so that you feel that you can see the true shape of the story as it wants to and ought to be, you return for Pass Two.

Pass Two
1. Record and adjust the timeline
The story’s timeline may extend earlier than the earliest point of present moment action and later than the last moment of present action. Can you explore references to the backstory, or hopes and plans that extend beyond the action?

2. Adjust the arc of understanding.
Are you explaining too much? Too little?

3. Polish the mirrors in the mirrored hall of infinity: moments that endlessly reflect
What are the motifs? Where do they repeat? Which parts should mirror each other? Which parts should be prefigured? This is where you play with structure.

4. Polish the burrs off
Read the piece aloud and listen to the rhythm. You’ll hear the false notes, unnatural syntax, incorrect words or phrases, repetitive elements, and anything else that will disrupt your reader’s experience of the narrative at a sound and language level.

5. Share the work with friends whose feedback you trust

6. Repeat all these steps until you think the story is ready

7. Put the story away for months.

8. Repeat all of the above until you think the story or longer work of fiction is ready for submission or publication.
The spine and ribs revision method applied

I used this method for the last assignment of the course, which was to revise a story we had already written. I revised a story about Horacio, a shoe-shine guy. Horacio has a simple moral worldview that good people are recognisable by the care they lavish on their shoes. He has an encounter with an enigmatic drifter, who he sees initially as a devil and then as an angel. An apparent miracle occurs which forces Horacio to question his morality.

I was really pleased and surprised by the result. In pass one, I came to recognise that in addition to Horacio’s worldview there was another idea lurking: an exploration of the way we try to fit events to our worldview. I considered whether I needed to give Horacio more of a backstory, to explain his morality. I also considered whether I needed to give a clearer explanation of the drifter, and whether he really was a messianic figure, or whether he was manipulating Horacio. The main conclusion was that I needed to give the story more room to breathe – to draw out the conflict between Horacio and the drifter. I also moved the devil/angel definition of the drifter from the narrator’s voice to Horacio’s voice.

In pass two, I had a lot of fun. At this point I layered in a lot more complexity that had been lurking in the story as subtext without me being aware of it. In particular, I saw that the events which challenge our worldview with good outcomes need not themselves be good.
I gave Horacio a backstory, tracing his morality to his flinty mother who scoured him of religious doubt. I considered, and rejected, extending to story to what happened after Horacio’s revelation.

The work on structure and motif in the second pass was really the glory of the thing for me, perhaps because playing with structure is the bit of revision I enjoy most. I recognised motifs not only of devils and angels, and good shoes/good men, but also of burnishing/scouring and aridity that I hadn’t been conscious of. I saw how I could connect them more clearly. I saw that I could prefigure the climax (hopefully, without it being obvious). I gave Horacio a more explicit revelation that good shoes did not necessarily imply a good person. I altered the ending so that it echoed the beginning. Interestingly, this changed the story but not the subtext. In the original version, Horacio leaves his shoe-shine stand and follows the drifter. In the revised version, he refuses. But this didn’t matter because it still underscored Horacio’s revelation.

I shared the rewrite with two other writers on the course before submitting it. One wanted a tighter structure and deletions, and the other a greater opening up. I tried two different approaches to structure and I now had two different versions of the piece! One was narratively more straightforward but eliminated some of the backstory. The other was more convoluted but denser. My head opted for the first version, my heart for the second. In the end, I went for the first version when I realised that my heart was attached to a piece of descriptive writing that didn’t really move the story forward.

I’m really pleased with the result. One reader said “you have deepened and expanded this into a lovely parable”, and another described it as a “richly intelligent read, full of a kind of tenderness”. Now I just need to leave it to infuse and mature in a deep recess of my hard drive before I return to it.

Following on from my last post about the perils of slavishly following the dictates of a machine editor, I had this salutary lessons. I was editing a story in which a character quotes Shakespeare’s speech from As You Like It:

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”

My editing software says the Bard of Avon made some schoolboy errors here. The whole thing has a “glue index” of 51.4%. Glue words are the 200 or so most common words in English, which slow the reader down. Worse still, the first sentence has 71.4% of “glue” words – all, the, world. ‘s, a, and, men.

Ha! Much ado about nothing.

Are machines stupid? Yes, of course. And here’s proof.

I love my editing software. I use Pro Writing Aid to ferret out all those repetitive words, sneaky adverbs, and missing commas. It speeds up my editing and never tires. BUT …….

It’s a machine – the programme has no clue what the words mean. The first line of the chapter from A Golden Illusion that I’m working on at the moment is

“The night was long and adventurous, the morning easy and languorous.”

I was rather pleased with this, and the way it got me out of having to write another sex scene.

Pro Writing Aid wasn’t so impressed, and picked this out as a “sticky sentence”, containing 63.6% of “glue” words. The target figure for such words is below 40%. The software explains glue words as follows:

“Glue words are the 200 or so most common words in English (excluding the personal pronouns). Glue words are generally used to link nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. You can think of the glue words as the empty space in your writing. The more of them there are the more empty space you readers have to pass through to get to the actual meaning.”

Unthinkingly I obeyed since I was in the midst of correcting lots of mistakes. The revised sentence was

“The hours before dawn were prolonged and adventurous, the morning easy and languorous”,

which successfully banished the stickiness by paraphrasing the glue words “night” and “long”. Success! Except that it’s a terrible sentence and doesn’t convey the meaning I wanted. On re-reading, I reverted to my original.

Another thing the software searches for is sentence length. The target for the average number of words per sentence is between 11 and 18, and the maximum length for any sentence is set at below 30 words. Again, this is a reasonable rule, but when followed mechanically, it led to unreadable sentences.

For example, the programme drove me to amalgamate the following sentences into one.

“‘No, not exactly, but it’s a trivial private matter. As I understand it, something to do with a stain on the Parris family reputation.’”

The resulting 24 word sentence was grammatical and within the maximum word limit, but it was harder to read.

Another set of algorithms confirmed the reading difficulty of the sentence. Hemingway App (http://www.hemingwayapp.com/) checks the readability of text, though it will only analyse around 5000 words at a time. The long sentence required a reading age of 14-15 years, while the original corresponded to a reading age of 11.

So, the moral of the tale is don’t allow the god of creativity to become a slave to the machine. I’m a big fan of the machine editor, but make sure your human eye reads everything over afterwards. Correct the text to what you intended to say, even if that breaks a rule or two.

Words motivate. We all want to get better at writing motivating prose. I want to tell you about the EMV, my latest toy that helps with writing motivating words. EMV stands for Emotional Marketing Value. The toy is the Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer (http://www.aminstitute.com/cgi-bin/headline.cgi). It has nothing to do with creative writing, but rather it analyses advertising copy. We may think we don’t write marketing copy, but the elevator pitch and the blurb of your book is advertising copy. It aims to secure a sale. This is also true of the first sentence of your book. If you don’t hook the reader’s attention, they may stop reading.

The EMV Analyzer scores your headline or your elevator pitch according to the number of words with emotional resonance, in relation to the total number of words. It also tells you whether the appeal is primarily intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual. The explanation says the English language has around 20% EMV words. A professional copywriter will have 30-40% of these words in their headline, while a gifted copywriter will achieve 50-75%. The blurb claims “While many marketers ‘guess’ how people will react to various words and offers, we have determined a test which will give you an actual rating that you can use to judge how well received your copy will be to others.”

For fun, I ran the elevator pitch for The Golden Illusion through the Analyzer. I had to run it in two bits because the maximum word length is 20.

The pitch reads:

“A mystery story with a difference, in which a conjurer turns detective. Believing he is on the trail of an ancient illusion, he is, in fact, uncovering a conspiracy that hides a crime 150 years old.”

The EMV score was 22.22%. Probably not enough to capture the attention of that busy publisher in the elevator. The EMV words were all intellectually appealing

So then I rewrote it, trying out different words, finally reaching a score of 60.87% with this version:

“An unusual mystery story. An illusionist turned sleuth, believing he hunts an ancient illusion, reveals a conspiracy hiding an atrocity spanning the centuries.”

The EMV words were a mixture of intellectual and spiritual appeal. I’m not sure I’m going to trust my fate to an algorithm and I may tweak it further, but I like the change.

There is some academic fruit-loopery that accompanies the tool, if you’re that way inclined. It is said to derive from the work of US language scholar Dr Hakim Chisti. He “found that there are these basic underlying harmonics, a tonality that flows through language, which are in many ways more profound and powerful than the dictionary meaning itself.” Or if you prefer, you can ignore that, and just use the tool.

By the way, I also tried out the Analyzer on various headlines for this post.
“Getting maximum punch from your pitch” had a score of 0%.
“Making pitches work for you” scored 20% and was spiritual
“Pithy pitches that woo for you” got 50% and was spiritual

In the last post I looked at some techniques for plotting out a novel. In this post, I’ll look at one technique for improving the writing of the scenes that make up the plot. I’ve been looking through Randy Ingermanson’s advice on writing the perfect scene. I mentioned his Snowflake method in the last post.

You can find his advice on writing the perfect scene here: http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/

I’m not going to go through the whole technique. You can look it up if you’re interested in the detail. Basically he talks about the large-scale structure of scenes and their small-scale structure. This is tried and tested stuff, he says. All scenes are either SCENES or SEQUELS. A SCENE is structured, he says, into Goal, Conflict and Disaster.  A SEQUEL is structured into Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision.  Sequels follow scenes and give rise to new scenes.

He writes “You may think these patterns are too simple. You may think this is reducing writing to Paint-by-Numbers. Well, no. This is reducing fiction to the two patterns that have been proven by thousands of novelists to actually work. There are plenty of other patterns people use. They typically work less well.”

I thought it would be interesting to try out his technique on my novel A Prize of Sovereigns. I analysed Chapter 1, and it seemed to fit his idea of a SCENE.

He then goes on to say it’s not enough to create a structure of SCENES and SEQUELS. You have to actually write them, which is where the small-scale structure comes in. The small-scale structure, he says, is a chain of MRUs. MRUs are units (the U) of objective Motivations (the M), followed by subjective Reactions (the R). A scene is just a string of MRUs. He gives the following as an example of a motivation, objective and external: “The tiger dropped out of the tree and sprang toward Jack”; and this as an example of a reaction, internal and subjective: “A bolt of raw adrenaline shot through Jack’s veins. He jerked his rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the tiger’s heart, and squeezed the trigger. ‘Die, you bastard!'”. Anything which isn’t a Motivation or a Reaction should be ruthlessly purged, he argues.

So I analysed my chapter into MRUs. You can see the beginning of it below. I’ve colour coded the motivations in blue, the reactions in red, and other stuff in purple. After the analysis, I rewrote the chapter according to his stipulations.

Original

MRU 1
What a fragile thing a man’s head was. So easily stove in with a hammer. Or lopped from the neck with a swing of a broadsword.

Byrom’s thoughts were oddly detached as he watched. He yielded only the hint of a shiver as Nye Stokys’ severed head bounced on the wooden planking of the bridge.

BACKSTORY
Byrom, of the House of Simmister, had claimed his share of heads in battle. He liked war,
MRU 2
but as he watched the rebel’s headless body crumple and then slowly fall, he knew this was different. This was the first time he had taken a head under a flag of parley. From here, there was no going back. There was no honour in this. But the meaning of that word depended on who you were. The honour of Kings lay in safeguarding the realm.

Revised version
MRU 1
Nye Stokys’ severed head bounced on the wooden planking of the bridge.

Byrom’s thoughts were oddly detached as he watched, yielding only the hint of a shiver What a fragile thing a man’s head was. So easily stove in with a hammer. Or lopped from the neck with a swing of a broadsword.

BACKSTORY

Byrom, of the House of Simmister, had claimed his share of heads in battle. He liked war,

MRU 2
But this was the first time he had taken a head under a flag of parley. From here, there was no going back.

As he watched the rebel’s headless body crumple and then slowly fall, he knew this was different. There was no honour in this. But the meaning of that word depended on who you were. The honour of Kings lay in safeguarding the realm.

The results were interesting. Mostly the Chapter fell out into MRUs and backstory. The MRUs were often inverted, with the reaction coming before the motivation, which was something I hadn’t noticed before. Also, a no-no in Ingermanson’s method, some paragraphs mixed motivations and reactions,as you can see. So in the rewrite, I put motivations before reactions, and separated them into distinct paragraphs. It’s the reaction that puts you into the character’s head, so it’s important to give it prominence. I also checked that the reactions followed a logical sequence – from feeling, to reflex response, to rational action and speech. I eliminated everything that wasn’t an MRU.

Did it make the chapter better? It makes sense, but I’m still not sure. I certainly wasn’t happy about losing the backstory or other elements, such as the description of the main character. I don’t see how you can do away with dropping in backstory. As for the strict sequence of motivation followed by reaction, I don’t know whether readers will find it harder to identify with an MRU if the reaction comes before the motivation. Do we always need to see the zombie before we hear the scream, or is the scream primal enough sometimes?

I’d be really interested to hear from anyone else who’s tried the technique.

A poor workman may always blame his tools, but a good workman always makes sure he has the right tools for the job. I mentioned in the third post, Plotting out a Story, the character tool I use. Perhaps you might be interested in knowing a little more about tools.

Perhaps of course, you won’t. For some writers, the idea of tools is anathema. If you follow a format, they might say with some justification, the writing will become mechanical – it will impede creativity. Such writers enjoy the roller-coaster ride, hanging on for dear life as their characters and their subconscious lead them through a winding plot.

The counter-argument would be that if you’re not sure where your story is going, or who your characters are, you can spend months writing a 100,000 word first draft that doesn’t hang together, and lacks continuity. It’s worth remembering that, since millions of whatever currency they work in are at stake, screenwriters and film directors never trust their work to whims of the Muse, and to the vagaries of their memories.

There’s absolutely no reason why you should use any tools at all, but, if you don’t, be prepared for some pretty savage editing after your first draft.

So let me talk about tools. I said in an earlier post that, for me, the elements of good story-telling are the plot, the characters, and the quality of the writing. I’ve already written about the tool I use to keep track of my character, so let me talk about plot. Perhaps in a later post I’ll talk about tools that can help good writing.

There are lots of theories about what makes a good plot structure. A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. After a set-up, tension should rise to a climax and then be resolved. This is the basis for the Three Act Structure, much used in screen-writing. The first act sets the scene, introduces the protagonist, and contains the inciting incident, which drives the rest of the plot. The inciting incident poses a problem. The screenwriter, Michael Hauge in his book Writing Screenplays that Sell, says there are five possible goals that flow from the set-up:

• To escape
• To stop something from happening
• To deliver something of value to where it’s needed
• To retrieve something of value and return it to the right people or place
• To win something (a contest, love, respect etc.)

The second act, is one of rising tension as the protagonist struggles to solve the problem posed by the inciting incident. In this, he or she is usually added by others, and foiled by an antagonist. Conflict is an essential part of tension. The author, Randy Ingermanson, creator of the Snowflake writing method (http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/), is a great believer in combining disaster with the Three Act Structure. He believes in a “three-disasters-plus-an-ending” structure, with the first disaster at the end of Act 1, the second in the middle of Act 2, and the third at the end of Act 2. You can buy his tool as software, but you can just as easily create it yourself on a spreadsheet.

The third act, the ending, provides the resolution to the problem.

This, of course, is only one way of thinking about plot. Joseph Campbell, in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, said that all stories were variants of one “mono-myth”. George Lucas followed Campbell’s recipe in the making of Star Wars, and there is another writing method that is built on this basis – the Agile Method (http://agilewriters.com). I used my own variant of the Agile formula for the book I’m working on now, The Golden Illusion. Just to see what would happen, I plotted the story arc into four phases:

• Set-up
• Discovery and growth
• Decline and despair
• Climax and dénouement

It worked pretty well for keeping track of the story, though it escaped the boxes in every direction. You’ll notice this structure only gives me one major disaster, where the Snowflake method advocates three. The protagonist was thwarted in his drive to the goal, and lost his girlfriend and best friend into the bargain. But there were, of course, other minor setbacks as well as triumphs on the way there.

Other people disagree vehemently with Campbell’s mono-myth idea. Critics have argued, for example, that he was oblivious to the stories women tell. As I mentioned above, Michael Hauge believes there are five basic stories. Christopher Booker, influenced by Jung’s psychology, believed there were seven basic stories. Vladimir Propp analysed Russian fairy tales, and claimed to have identified 31 different plots, while Georges Polti advocated for 36 fundamental dramatic situations. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

However you design your plot. It helps to plan (or at least record as you write) the essential elements. You need something that will keep track of your timeline, so you don’t get jumps in sequence, or time of day, or sequence. You need something to keep track of where the action is going – particularly if you have several threads interwoven in your story. This is my master story-board template for The Golden Illusion

I took out the details, so there are no spoilers when the book finally, if ever, sees the light of day. But, you can see the grid is divided horizontally into the four elements of the arc, with an associated time-line, and vertically into the main plot, and the three sub-threads (A, B, and C). These sub-threads were: the protagonist’s search for the secret of an ancient Egyptian magic trick, which he believes will be a “Golden Illusion” that will make his fortune; the unfolding story of a group of nineteenth century villagers that seems to be connected to the Golden Illusion; and the protagonist’s problem in emotional commitment. There is also a column for characters, so the main events that happen to each character can be tracked.

For my next book, the sequel to A Prize of Sovereigns, I have modified this template and added two new elements. The first is a summary of the whole book. There are two summaries: a one sentence summary, which is the pre-cursor of the elevator pitch (see post 4: After the writing is over – publishing), and a one-paragraph elaboration of the elevator pitch. Previously I have written these only when the book was finished, but Randy Ingermanson advocates doing this at the beginning in his Snowflake method, so I thought I’d give it a try. At least I now know exactly what the book is about, and am half way to the pitch and synopsis. The second new element is a scene list, again a suggestion from Ingermanson, with a one sentence description of each scene.

I have used a version of scene lists before. In the past, I’ve written one paragraph summaries of each chapter, but only after I’d drafted the chapter. This made it easier to keep track of where I had got to if there was a break in writing, as well as vastly simplifying the writing of the synopsis. What is new this time is that I’ll write the scene descriptions before I draft. I’m curious to see how that works out. In theory, it should make writing the first draft much quicker.