What to Address First
I come back from a wonderful summer writing workshop with my manuscript in shreds. Hopeful shreds, but still scattered bits I can’t recognize as my own plan or purpose. Seven good writers read it—I was lucky they are good, and I got to read their own writing to confirm this. Each one must’ve spent hours, because the notes and suggestions are extensive.
This is what I signed up for. What I wanted. Problem is, I don’t know what to do with what I bought.
All the feedback, that is. Where do I start? It’s so overwhelming, I will pour myself a glass of lemonade and go sit on the screened porch with my dogs and a historical novel that sold well but I don’t think much of. It will render me unconscious for a while. Maybe when I wake up, or when tomorrow comes or next week or next month, I’ll know what to do with my story.
We writers pay good money for an overwhelm of choices, don’t we. Especially in summer, when writing workshops sprout up everywhere and it’s a fun idea to grab a friend and go for a week. I used to drive each July from Minneapolis, where I lived then, to Iowa City to attend workshops at the Iowa Summer Writer’s Conference. I stayed with my painter friend in her lovely Arts and Crafts house. I’d go for tea or ice cream after each day’s workshop, sit with my laptop and watch people on the street, imagine how to write better dialogue. I would try not to be intimated by the instructor, whose work I adored but who seemed (most of the time) a normal, quirky person just like me (what a relief—or was that just a persona, similar to the character she wrote who loved adopting other people’s personalities?).
At night, I slept if I was lucky. I tried not to think about what I’d do, when I got home, with the story I thought I knew what I was doing with before I went.
Don’t get me wrong: I love revision. I worked for most of my adult life as an editor for a small publishing company. I thrill at word choice and sentence length and lyrical descriptions. But I hate this confusion and overwhelm that comes from receiving excellent feedback.
Some summers, I came home from those Iowa workshops and never touched my story or chapter for months. Once, ten years went by before I unearthed my workshopped story and tried to use the feedback. It’s not that the writing was bad, the idea worthless. It’s not that the feedback wasn’t spot on. It was about not knowing how to carve a reasonable path through it. To absorb it step by step instead of in an unmanageable gulp. To input edits in some kind of order that made sense to me.
Finding an order for revision is what I always sought. And how few writers even contemplate this as a possibility.
I stopped going to those summer writing workshops a few decades ago because I’d stockpiled enough feedback on unrevised stories to last me a dozen years and I was still stymied each time. That’s when I found author Robert Boswell and his book The Half-Known World.
Boswell is known for his idea of approaching revision in “transitional drafts.” The idea that we keep revising and each iteration opens a new world. The idea is also to be open to each new world, which helps my annoying, perfectionist mind from feeling I have to GET THIS ONE RIGHT. That was the first clue.
Was it Boswell who talked (somewhere, or someone else?)about the master list? To take ALL the comments, ALL the feedback, even the suggestions you dislike, and compile them in a huge document? I loved it. I did it. It worked.
Best of all, the recommendation to start with the smallest item on the list when I sit down to begin revising. What a breakthrough.
I used to believe, before transitional drafts, before the genius of this master-list idea and starting tiny, that choosing the biggest problem to tackle first was most efficient. How the pros did it. Big problems take big confidence to tackle, confidence in yourself as writer and in the story as worthwhile. Didn’t I have that?
Not really. Not after the mega-feedback I’d accumulated. My confidence was low and small, the story felt foreign and far away. I wasn’t ready for pro revision.
I decided that the goal with my first revision steps would be to regain (1) my confidence as a writer and (2) my affinity with this beast of a story/novel/cnf essay I’d spent so much time bleeding over. I knew the beast needed work. I knew revision would give it back its life blood. But not if it sucked me dry in the meantime.
So I had to talk my perfectionism down. Go back to baby steps.
It actually was fun to start the master list. I’m an inveterate list maker, I love anything to do with lists. The idea of one huge list that gathered—without censor—each idea from the pages of feedback didn’t set me back. I was a little appalled that I had to include feedback I hated but I’m also curious about testing out stuff that I shy away from (call it stupidity or bravery). So I transferred each and every item of feedback to a new document, numbering each item.
I decided not to order or evaluate these items, just scribe. A task that took some days.
It was surprisingly hard to keep the inner censor quiet. Especially if my memory dwelt on the person behind the most disliked comments (their voice, the way they wouldn’t look at me when they talked about my piece). Like someone who cuts you off in traffic—the black pickup that noses your bumper on the back road and swerves to pass—I had strong opinions about both the person and their comments. And, I tried to reason with myself, there were so many other, obviously more valuable comments, so why not omit these disliked ones? But no, I entered them (albeit at the bottom of the list). I forced myself to detach from the person and just focus on the suggestion, not evaluate it. Keeping myself honest, I entered every single suggestion, even if I couldn’t see ever using it. I fostered no opinions. This approach served well later in the process, because sometimes the suggestions I liked least at the start proved valuable at the final stages.
The list was long. From a weekend workshop, forty to sixty items often made their way onto the list. From multi-week classes, where I got two dozen ideas each meeting, the master list stretched for many pages.
At first, I handwrote the list; I liked the meditation of scribing the notes in my own words into a notebook. I could think about them, translate them a bit, as I wrote.
But it became clumsy, impossible to sort (the next task), so I created a Word doc and entered them on my laptop. I named the master list something obvious like “master revision list for XX [story or book title].”
Once all the items got on the list, I sorted them. First, each got a time-and-task ranking. I evaluated their level of difficulty as a task and gave a rough estimate of how much the task would take. For instance, a heavy research task might not be high in difficulty but it’d require setting aside hours online or at the library. A task whose possible changes ricocheted through many chapters might require more storyboarding or thinking through—that rated high difficulty. Small tasks like finding out the accurate details of a city location were low in both time and weight.
Once the ranks are given, I moved all the low-effort tasks to the top of the list, moving down the list to the most onerous ones. On the computer, that was easy.
It sounds like a lot of busywork. But it paid off. The time spent evaluating and sorting got me acclimated to each idea. I sifted them through my mind, and many generated questions that excited me. These questions were valuable, I knew—and I took them to my questions list (see my the post on The Freedom of Unanswered Questions), which always fostered creative ideas.
There are several potential stumbling spots in this method. One is when I sort and evaluate—I’m often tempted to disregard a “silly” suggestion. Oh, how I’ve regretted it when I do. Another stumble can occur when I get cocky from the energy of making the list and want to start with the biggest question (see faults of that plan, above). If I’m smart and lucky, I’ll do it right and start small.
Some days, when the revising is going well, when I feel confidence in myself and affinity for the story again, I might choose two small tasks and one larger one from the list. I even toggle between. Mark the day/date/time/season for each chapter (an easy task, helping to smooth out jaggedy timelines) and rethink the backstory of one of my protagonists (a harder task, requiring thought, freewriting, research). But I usually don’t tackle the harder ones until that confidence and affinity is solid again.
Just to repeat: the first few days of actual revising have the single goal of building my affinity with my story again. Most times, after these summer workshops, it’s diluted or dashed. I am confused as to the purpose of the story. I can’t recall why I loved and believed in it. Small tasks bring the love back.
I find a keen satisfaction at crossing off completed small tasks. Confidence gets restored. I can do this.
Finally, I tell myself not to think about the big tasks ahead of me. They will still be there but I’ll be better equipped to handle them. My job right now is to finish with the smaller revisions that open the door to more global changes.
A student once objected: “If I’m going to completely rework chapter seven later, why would I want to take care of some small detail that needs fixing inside it now?” A valid concern. I don’t actually feel it’s wasted time, though. Like I said above, a small fix may indeed be deleted later but the process of reworking opens new ideas. Not only am I regaining my confidence in my own writing, but I’m playing with options—Boswell’s transitional drafts. All of this is worth the time. Like ripping out a row of knitting when a stitch has been dropped, the second try goes faster and easier.
Share Your Weekly Writing Exercise
In an interview for The Author’s Guild bulletin, novelist Peter Ho Davies called these small changes “good for morale.” They allowed him to feel a forward movement, making the story his again. That affinity, which I spoke of earlier, helps me find the reason I am writing in the first place.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Read this excellent interview with Robert Boswell from Fiction Writers Review on transitional drafts if you’re unfamiliar with the theory. Then, using the feedback from a recent story, chapter, or manuscript, start a master list. Use the steps outlined above to create the list, trying to reserve judgment about the worth of each suggestion.
When you have your list in hand, begin evaluating the tasks for time and difficulty. What will take you a few minutes, what demands hours or days? What will cause reverberations through your entire piece of writing, what is fairly inconsequential?
Finally, sort the evaluated list from smaller to harder tasks. Then try the method of picking one or two small tasks, maybe one larger one as well if you feel affinity and confidence is yours today.