Revision And Self-Editing

by James Scott Bell

  This is a suggestion from Natalie Goldberg. Take a portion of your writing, usually a descriptive passage (setting or character), and do a free-form exercise expanding it.

  In your manuscript on the printed page or computer, jot a placeholder, like the letter (A) with a circle around it.

  Then take a fresh page or open a new document, put the (A) at the top, and just go, letting your imagination run free. Don't censor yourself and don't try to make this good writing! You're going for images and insights. It's a total right-brain gabfest.

  Here's what I mean. Below is a section from my writing journal:

  It had an actual downtown, with rows of shops. Bout iques, hardware, shoes, antiques, books. The place hadn't been Wal-Marted yet, though it did have the obligatory Starbucks. He stopped in and treated himself to a Mocha Frap. The afternoon was warm and it was a long drive back to L.A.

  He walked around a little. The town had a nice looking Mexican grill and a Carl's Jr. A bowling alley and a two-screen theater. Brad Pitt's latest, along with some teen horror flick.

  For this exercise, I identify the places for a riff:

  It had an actual downtown, with rows of shops. Boutiques, hardware, shoes, antiques, books. The place hadn't been Wal-Marted yet, though it did have the (A) obligatory Starbucks. He stopped in and treated himself to a Mocha Frap. The afternoon was warm and it was a long drive back to L.A.

  He walked around a little. The town had a nice looking Mexican grill and a Carl's Jr. A bowling alley and a two-screen theater. Brad Pitt's latest, along with some (B) teen horror flick.

  Now for the writing, just going:

  (A)

  Green monster, with tentacles all over the world, reaching into every town and city and home, the great Temple of need. Caffeine buzz, and wasn't that what the world needs now, buzz sweet buzz?

  (B)

  Ah yes, the teen horror movie, the kind that inevitably featured the latest TV hotties making their big-screen debuts in an entirely forgettable waste of celluloid with posters always featuring the ample bosom of the latest eye candy who will soon enough occupy the same dustbin of cultural irrelevancy as a Paris Hilton and what's-her-name, you know the one, or do you?

  Strange, I know, but again this isn't for publication. And I would write more than the brief illustrative passage above. What I'm looking for is that one gem that can actually make the cut and please me stylistically.

  Read the following excerpts one at a time. Read each four or five times. Read them out loud once. Then write a page trying to capture the same voice. Make up your own story situation, and just go. Once you've done your page, pare it down to a single paragraph.

  It may turn out to be some gold you'll want to keep.

  Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

  —Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville

  It was a pleasure to burn.

  It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

  —Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

  If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

  —The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

  But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

  —On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

  Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

  I am haunted by waters.

  —A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean

  At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a pillow to his chest, calling his lost wife's name in the darkness. The anguished and haunted quality of his own voice had shaken him from sleep. Dreams fell from him not all at once but in trembling veils, as attic dust falls off rafters when a house rolls with an earthquake.

  —Sole Survivor, by Dean Koontz

  [ SETTING & DESCRIPTION ]

  Setting, of course, is where your story takes place.

  Description is how you bring it, and the characters who populate it, to life. You want to create the feeling in the reader that she is experiencing a real place right along with real characters.

  That's what editors and readers are looking for. They'll ask, "Make the place come alive for me. I want to see it, smell it. I want to know the characters up close and personal. Think you can do that for me?" Yes, you can.

  SCOUTING A SETTING

  Here's a major tip for setting: Think of it as another character in your book. Make it offer up possibilities of conflict and tension. Make it brood over the proceedings and exert influence.

  Remember the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's The Shining? The eerie place, closed up for the winter, is literally pulsating with ghostly life. And there's snow all over, which comes into play in a big way.

  You need to get to know your setting intimately. If it's a place you've never been, you're going need to do research.

  Even if you write about a place you know well, that's not a license to take it easy. Most of my books take place in my native Los Angeles, but I still always try to walk through the actual locations, taking pictures, recording my impressions.

  Use all your senses when researching a location. Take along a checklist and fill it out, with questions like:

  • What is the weather like here?

  • How does it affect the citizens?

  • What are the most prominent buildings or features here?

  • What docs the place smell like?

  • What sort of flora and fauna is present?

  • What is everyday life like here?

  • What do the homes tell me about the people inside?

  • What does the place "sound" like? What do you hear at different locations in the area?

  • What unique features are there?

  These can become vivid details for your book. A great place to gather inside information on a locale is an independent bookstore. This can also serve the dual purpose of introducing yourself as a writer and starting a professional relationship with the store owner. Ask for stories about the town's history and recent past.

  Pick up local newspapers and flyers. Stop by the Chamber of Commerce as well for visitor information. Collect e-mail contact information so you can follow up later with questions that may occur to you.

  Use resources like Google Earth to remind yourself of layouts and features and roads. For his novel Empire, Orson Scott Card relied almost exclusively on Google Maps and Google Earth to give him the details of streets and locations, and even locales where he could construct imaginary reservoirs.

  TELLING DETAILS

  The telling detail is one that describes instantly and uniquely. It makes a place or character come to life immediately.

 
; In Description, novelist Monica Wood writes that telling details come "suddenly, from your unconscious, to tell you what you need to know ... and deliberately, from your conscious writing self."

  You can also go hunting for lots of details, make a list, and then choose the best ones.

  Details, when woven into the narrative naturally, put the reader into a story world. This enables the weaving of the fictive dream, which is the goal of every novelist.

  If details are scant, the story won't feel full. For the reader, even though he may not be able to articulate it, something will seem to be missing. The reading experience is thin.

  I once had a student present a historical novel with lots of action in the first chapter. The time was the sixteenth century. The place, the Netherlands. Yet for all the movement there were hardly any specific details. The time and place weren't nailed down. The story could have been happening almost anywhere, anytime.

  The remedy for this is the well-placed, telling detail. In Part IV of my historical novel Glimpses of Paradise, the setting is 1921 Los Angeles, and Zee Miller is an aspiring actress:

  Zee Miller stopped by the light post and pretended to look in her handbag. She poked at the meager insides with her hand, feeling around as if in search of an item, but in reality keeping watch out of the corner of her eye.

  The grocer was finishing up his sidewalk display for the morning, whistling as he worked. Zee watched and listened. Her gaze from time to time fell upon the two oranges that sat especially succulent in the morning sun, atop a pile of freshly unloaded citrus.

  There were some window signs on the front of the grocery— Carnation Milk, 11 cents per can; Roasted Coffee, 2-tb. pkg., 40 cents; Ben Hur Soap, 5 cents per bar. She couldn't afford any of it. Luxury items all. But oh, did the coffee sound nice.

  Zee made a pretense of looking ever more carefully in her bag, as if a loose dime might have fallen to the bottom. In truth she had not even a dime. But she made it seem so, telling herself that this is the way Mary Pickford would look for a dime were she a young wife with a hint of trouble at home. Wide eyes, furrowed brow, increasing the appearance of concern.

  The market on Ninth Street near Flower was, Zee had come to know, one of the busiest in the downtown district. A crossroads for the shopping traffic that would include a large sampling of the female population of Los Angeles—the upper crust from Angeleno Heights and Elysian Park; hard working housewives from east of the Los Angeles River; domestic help from the mansions on Adams Street; unmarried women from Glendale and Hawthorne, who trollied in to their jobs at the phone company or stenographic pool.

  Even the occasional down-and-outer, the ones who defied classification because each had her own sad story, her tale of woe, one that occasionally turned up in the crime sheet of the paper when the inevitable happened—caught stealing or skipping the rent, or occasionally

  rousted from a prostitutes' den.... She wore a plain brown walking dress and brown leather shoes with fraying laces and a missing eyelet. Her brown shirtwaist had a hole just under the left arm, which necessitated turning her right side toward the grocer. She did not wish to arouse suspicion.

  Turning now to a crate of apples, the grocer began whistling another tune entirely. This Zee recognized as "Ain't We Got Fun," a ubiquitous melody these days.

  For a contemporary novel, the need for an immediate sense of place is

  equally important. Sol Stein opens his novel The Magician like this:

  It had been snowing off and on since Christmas. For nearly a month now, while the men of the town were at work, boys would come out in twos or threes with shovels to clear a pathway on their neighbors' sidewalks. An occasional older man, impoverished or proud, could be seen daring death with a shovel in hand, clearing steps so that one could get in and out of the house, or using a snowblower on a driveway in the hope of getting his wife to the supermarket and back before the next snow fell.

  At night mostly, when the traffic had thinned, the town's orange snowplows would come scraping down the roads, their headlamps casting funnels of still-falling snow. Alongside these thoroughfares, the snow lay in hillocks, some ten or fifteen feet high, thawing a bit each day in bright sun, then refreezing, forming the crust on which it would soon snow again. It seemed impossible that spring might come, and that these humped gray masses would eventually vanish as water into the heel-hard ground.

  Notice that Stein doesn't give us snowplows, but orange snowplows. That's

  called getting specific.

  PUT DETAILS WITHIN ACTION

  Details can be presented blandly:

  There was a livery stable in town, at the end of the wooden sidewalk, where travelers stabled their horses. Today, the town was bustling with activity.

  But here is how the Western writer Todhunter Ballard did it in High Iron:

  Lonnigan stabled his horse at Chandler's Livery, asking the barn man to watch out for a buyer, then carrying his slicker-wrapped bedroll under one long arm, he moved out upon the slatted sidewalk, his eager gray eyes missing no detail of the town's busy main street.

  Notice how specific, yet effortless, the details are. The livery stable is "Chandler's Livery," and the bedroll is "slicker-wrapped." The sidewalk is not just wood, but slatted. Ballard has painted a picture, but did it through the action and perspective of his main character. Thus the details don't distract, they serve.

  USE ALL THE SENSES

  The use of specific colors seems to enliven a scene. Here's John D. MacDonald from a Travis McGee novel, The Quick Red Fox:

  She wore flat sandals with gold straps. She wore faun-colored pants in a fine weave. Around her slender throat was knotted a narrow loose kerchief of green silk, precisely matching the single jewel she wore, an emerald as big as a sugar cube ...

  Sight and sound are easy. But what about smell and touch? Even taste? These are underutilized details. Watch for them in the fiction you read.

  Remember to use the principle of double duty. Your words should do more than describe. They should add to the mood and tone.

  The quintessential example of double duty in description comes from Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It opens:

  Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. ...

  Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards....

  Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

  That brings up another tip: If you describe the weather, have the characters react to it. Don't just write:

  It was a hot day. Jack walked down the block to buy a newspaper.

  Write:

  It was a hot day. Jack's sweat-soaked shirt stuck to him. He hated when that happened.

  CREATING MOOD

  Mood in your novel is like the score of a movie—it plays in the background, deepening the feelings in the reader. Illuminating details operate to both set up and pay off emotional moments.

  In Raymond Carver's "A Small, Good Thing," the opening lines set up a mood that shatters later in the narrative.

  Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child's favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a spaceship and launching pad unde
r a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet.

  Notice that it's a loose-leaf binder with photographs taped onto the pages. These make the scene real. But it's the details of the cake that create a mood of childhood dreams and the hopes of a mother. Scotty's promise is infinite, like space.

  So when he's hit by a car and dies, it jolts us all the more because so many hopes die with him.

  Paying off with just the right details intensifies the final impact of a scene or an entire novel. Consider the ending of Don DeLillo's White Noise, which creates an ironic sadness as supermarket shoppers in a doomed world try to go on as normal:

  And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

  A technique to help you capture mood details is the eyes closed drill. Close your eyes and let your imagination create detail-rich pictures for you. Don't rush this; experience it. Keep at it until you are emotionally charged by what you see.

  Then start writing down the details as if you were a journalist describing a real place. Later, edit and shape the material to solidify the mood you're trying to create. Expand on images by using metaphor and simile.

  Strive to come up with language as specific as this from Mary Karr s memoir The Liars' Club:

  Some firemen wearing canary-colored slickers started to move through the next room, and Dr. Boudreaux's thick fingers came again to rub the edge of my speckled nightgown the way old ladies at the five-and-dime tested yard goods.

  DON'T DUMP

  Beginning writers, especially those who write historical fiction, have a tendency to overdo their settings and descriptions. This is understandable, as they've usually spent a great deal of time in research. They want to pack every bit of information in, thinking this will grab the reader's interest and draw her into the story.