Revision Example: Targeted, Mid-drafting

July 10, 2023 A.L.H. Hughes

Okay, I said last writing post that I like revisions.

And recently I experienced a good example of the importance (for me*) of Targeted, Mid-drafting Revisions. There are lots of kinds of revisions, and I mostly adore them all (what’s not to love about effective problem-solving?), and so I thought it would be nice to share an example of this particular kind.

* Important disclaimer: I don’t want to try to give any instruction about when a writer should or shouldn’t do revisions. Some people say that revising while drafting just leads to endless tinkering and you never get anything finished. I’m sure they are perfectly right about themselves and people like them. But, if I forbade myself from revising while drafting, it would be like not being allowed to back-track in a maze. And my brain is the maze. Super ugh.

So, Targeted, Mid-drafting Revisions: a.k.a. How to restore some writing momentum when your (my) writer voice has gone off the rails.

The thing that makes this instance I want to talk about a nice example, is that I caught it relatively early, within a few paragraphs. However, because a) I’m a slow writer, and b) this was me getting stuck, that translates to a couple days of writing.

The thing that makes this not a great example, is that I’m still working on the first draft here, and a “Targeted, Mid-drafting Revision” does not produce polished prose. It just produces good-enough first-draft prose that I can get back into writing the story. That is the purpose of this type of revision. But when I get to showing you the example text below, I will understand that you are not blown away by the awesomeness of my revised prose. I’m certainly not. (But I am a chapter beyond this scene by now. Huzzah!)

For this example, I should also say that it was not even a little bit surprising that I got stuck here. (Though, was it a self-fulfilling prophesy? Did I get stuck because I knew I would get stuck?) This happened when I needed to write a time transition. (Dreaded transitions!) Worse, I couldn’t just skip over the time. (My favorite way to transition!) This time I had to give some summary explanation, impression, something, of what happened during the transition. (Dreaded narration!)

Now, I should say that I don’t dread narration so much as I despair of it. Some writers are so good at narration and it comes off so wonderfully and really adds an amazing spark to the story. I am not one of those writers. My natural writing style is close-3^rd. Always. If I could pull off a whole book where characters just touch things and I describe what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and how they feel about it, I would be golden. But alas.

So, narrated transitions are the opposite of my writing comfort zone. But I really needed one here. Fortunately, the above paragraph contains a clue as to how I revised the yucky, this-is-not-working paragraphs and got myself going again. The clue is ‘feelings’. The clue is: Find a way to bring it back around to something you’re good at. Find a way to use one of your writing touchstones.

So, time to show you the actual prose – Before and After. I cringe a bit because, as mentioned, the After is still a long way from polished. I rather suspect the ‘improvements’ won’t jump out at you. But I will pick out a couple of examples afterward, so hang in there.

(P.S., Lutha is the main-character. Iesha is his wife. Sevrin is their acquaintance / traveling companion. Sam Rama is the horse. Bear is the dog. Obin is Sevrin’s husband, who is not with them. This is their first day all on the road together, and while setting up camp for the evening really isn’t interesting enough for a full scene, I do want to provide detail on some of the logistics – hence, a narrated transition.)

Before:

With the three of them working together that way, it all went surprisingly smoothly, and they got the cart all the way up to the clearing with hardly any fuss and no foundering. A good team. Lutha hoped it was a good sign for their travel prospects in the days ahead.

Getting the camp itself settled wasn’t quite as simple, unfortunately. Lutha’d been planning to use the cart for a bed for at least one person – presumably Sevrin – but he’d made those plans with the cart not looking quite as full as it did now. Briefly he debated simple bedrolls on the ground for everyone, but then he remembered Obin’s admonishment that his wife was not to sleep on the ground – and the very deep scowl that had accompanied it. So, daily unpacking and repacking of the cart was just going to be the way forward from now on. He’d been sitting all day anyway – a bit of labor would work the kinks out, hey.

Sevrin stayed out of all of it – initial, mostly mumbled debate and heavy lifting after – by the simple expedient of assigning herself fire duty, which meant hunting down firewood first. And Iesha disappeared as soon as Sam Rama was unhitched and rubbed down and settled with a bag of oats. So, there was a long stretch of Lutha and Sevrin simply working quietly on their own tasks, the forest slowly dimming toward twilight around them.

Eventually, Sevrin got a pot of something heating up over the fire – not dissimilar to the ready soup Iesha had brought earlier – and then Iesha finally returned, bearing wild mushrooms, more spring greens, and – Lutha noticed – a long, red feather tied into her hair. Easier, though, simply not to wonder what that was all about. Especially as she also brought a short string of birds that immediately got buried down neat beneath the fire’s coals, but they were the wrong color for a match – dusky grey and brown.

After:

Another prospect, he realized shortly thereafter, was the sleeping arrangements. Lutha’d originally planned to put at least one person in the cart – presumably Sevrin – but that plan had been made with the cart looking not quite so full as it was now. Iesha and Sevrin had made things reasonably comfortable for sitting back there, but lying down was going to be a different matter. There wasn’t even…wasn’t even someone he could discuss it with, he realized, looking around and seeing Sevrin already off on the other side of the clearing, busily gathering firewood (and of course Lutha already had very clear instructions from her husband on this particular subject), and Iesha had unhitched Sam Rama, got him a sack of grain, and promptly vanished, Bear presumably at her heels. Also, Iesha wouldn’t care where Sevrin slept, not in the tiniest least.

The forest was starting to dim, the sun already gone behind the line of the mountain, and Lutha felt an itch of odd impatience run across his skin. Foolish. There was nothing for it but to start unloading. Sevrin was tall, but narrow enough – he could get her some sort of a space here. Doing it this way would mean a lot of work, every evening and every morning, but it wasn’t like they were in some terrible rush, hey. So, he got started, Sam Rama watching him incuriously from a safe distance from around his bag of grain.

He was almost done, pulling out one last parcel, when Iesha tapped him on the shoulder and stole a kiss once he looked around. She had a short string of birds hooked over one shoulder and a new, bright-red feather from something else entirely tied into her hair. There was a flash, too, of something wild in the smile she tossed Lutha’s way before turning ‘round to the fire to work on the birds, and Lutha felt his breath catch, half-hollow, at the sight of it, caught off-guard. It was full-moon tonight, but the air around Iesha was like the new-moon times – the times she’d disappear into the night and he wouldn’t see her for days, until he woke to find her beside him, with pine needles in her hair. The forest swallowed her on those nights, her and her calling… But it wasn’t new moon, and she’d promised.

“Now I see why your furs fetched you such a good price this spring,” Sevrin murmured, passing Lutha with a cook-pot of something it looked like she’d brought ready-prepared and startling him back to the here-and-now, with someone other than just Iesha about. She nodded over to Iesha’s efficient industry at the fire.

So, I think you can see some of the problems in the ‘Before’ text. For one, the em dashes were really getting to be too much. The order and detail with which I was presenting information was getting even more convoluted than usual. And everything is very past tense. It’s not working, and I’ve tied myself up in knots.

One of the reasons for this is that I was trying to be quick. The ‘After’ text is longer because it needed to be a little longer, even though longer does not mean longer sentences. And Before I was writing aggressively past-tense because I wanted this information to be past, but that’s a little like wanting the test to be over. Wanting it doesn’t make it so, and you’d better make yourself be present if you want to do anything like a good job of it.

Above, I mentioned that how my characters are feeling about something is one of my writing touchstones. It’s something that a) I’m good at, and b) is important to me and the stories I want to tell. If you’ve gotten stuck in your drafting and you need to back-up and revise, try figuring out what one of your touchstones is that will help get you back into the flow. The result may not be polished (as it clearly still is not in the ‘After’ text above) but linking back to something important to you can give you the confidence and the scaffolding you need to keep going, which is the important thing. (You can always do more delightful revising (polishing!) when the drafting is all done.)

So, near the very beginning of the two texts, I bolded one word to highlight how I started myself over with the ‘After’ text. I echoed the word “prospect”because I realized that it could be applied to some of the info-dump I was trying to get past, but right then it was also tied to how my main character was feeling about the current situation. Word echoes can be annoying writing, or they can be used to deliberately tie two things together, and I used this one to give my brain a bridge into the next writing section that was giving me trouble.

I also highlighted another bit: “There wasn’t even…wasn’t even someone he could discuss it with, he realized”, because this was the next piece of bridge I made for myself. I still needed to narrate some things, but this helped me put that narration into the voice of my main character, tying the narration to how he was feeling about the situation.

(I’m emphasizing feelings here because it’s the touchstone that often works for me, not because I think it’s the ultimate solution to everything. Everybody’s going to have their own touchstone that works for them. (Note: I really envy writers that get humor as one of their touchstones.) Further, how Lutha feels about setting up camp isn’t important by itself. Even that sentence just now was extremely boring. Even still, it’s the thing that got my writing flowing again – it’s the hack that gets me back into the story.)

Interestingly, I notice that almost right away the prose in the ‘After’ text starts to shift away from being so aggressively past tense. Between those two bridge elements I just mentioned is the phrase: “but lying down was going to be a different matter”. That’s future tense! at least in the context of the book, which is written in past tense.

You can argue, of course, whether the tenses in those ‘After’ sentences are well constructed. But either way, moving away from past-is-in-the-past tense provides more immediacy to what’s being described, even though that description is sort of info-dumpy.

Finally, because I mentioned that this section was hard for me to write because it’s a dreaded narrated transition, I’ll also highlight the (easy!) technique used to get out of the narration and back into a regular scene. I couldn’t quite manage to get there in the ‘Before’ text, but by the end of the ‘After’ text I’ve definitely gone back in-scene. The solution is: Suddenly Dialog!

I actually used this twice. Iesha is mute, so her dialog contribution is to tap Lutha on the shoulder, which works to bring us in-scene, but not super-strongly. But then we get a line of actual out-of-the-blue dialog from Sevrin, and we’re definitely back.

Suddenly Dialog! is one of my favorite ways to handle transitions. I most obviously use it for the beginnings of chapters, or for those transitions when I just flat skip from one thing to the next with a section break, but you can see here how it’s handy for more drawn-out transitions as well. It’s also good for when you’ve temporarily paused a scene to dump in some description or other information.

Anyway, Targeted, Mid-drafting Revisions are an important tool for me to regain writing momentum when things are slow or stalled. And, even if you’re not super into Revisions in general, you can see that I definitely am. I hope I’ll find more good examples to continue to babble at you about on this topic more in the future!

Happy writing!