axioms for revising a novel
this is the art of risk, babe
Sometimes, when working on a book, it just feels so … unlikely that anyone has ever actually finished one.
When I was writing the first draft of my first novel, I sometimes went to Prairie Lights in the afternoons and just started at the sheer volume of books, books which had been begun and then finished. It kind of offended me.
The only thing more baffling than writing the first draft of a novel is revising it. Honestly, I’ve said my piece about how AI has no place in writing, but believe me, if there was a chat-gpt program capable of reading my book and telling me how to fix it, I probably would have given in, or at least been incredibly tempted.
Revision is about reading, not writing.
In order to revise, you must read like the devil.
You must write the ending before you can understand the story.
Everything on the page is there for a reason.
Your book is about you.
Slowing down will finish faster.
Writing is the art of risk.
Revision is about reading, not writing.
Tell me if you've ever done this before: After letting your draft sit for a few months and getting feedback from trusted readers, you jump back into revision. You feel good about it. Thanks to your readers and the editorial clarity of a cold read, you have an idea of what's not working, and you get in there to fix it.
But once you've started fixing it, something about the story gets out of phase with itself. One subplot has grown too big, and as a result, the book loses steam in the middle. Or the ending doesn't fit anymore. Or, for reasons you can't totally pinpoint, you start hating the book, and you begin finding slim excuses to keep yourself away from the page. (“Oh, I need to do more research on 18th century wunderkammer, obviously!”)
Or, you give yourself tedious and desperate writing tasks. You get tetchy about commas or you agonize over word choice.
Or, you desperate creature, perhaps you decide a change in POV ought to do the trick. Here we go, back through the whole book, changing “I” to “she” or whatever.
Don't worry, I only know all this because I've done it myself! But seriously, if you catch yourself engaging in any of these stalling techniques, S T O P.
You haven't read your story yet—not clearly enough. And without reading it with utmost clarity and leastmost sentimentality, you cannot see the problem as it truly is. And without seeing the problem in its entirety, you cannot envision—quite literally, re-envision—a clear target to pursue.
In order to revise, you must read like the devil.
Oh, don't get me wrong, reading is lovely. Except in the case of novel revision, in which it is pure, beautiful pain.
Why? Because to read clearly means to lay bare all the mistakes you made in the first draft. It means seeing your repetitive little tics, your bad dialogue, your wandering descriptions. It also means, in the case of a novel, seeing something very vulnerable about yourself—but more on that in a minute.
Most writers sabotage their revisions by reading shallowly—too fast, too much skimming. Or by giving too much power to second readers. There is no way to fuck up your revision quite like fixing the “problems” others tell you to fix without having your own sense of what's going on in the book.
A great way to hide from the task of seeing the book clearly, problems and possible failures and all, is to begin frantic busywork. Culturally, we give great approval to anyone who is willing to put their shoulder to the wheel and push. It's a fabulous alibi, and it is totally and utterly possible to work away at a revision while having no honest clue about the soul of the book, hoping you'll find it eventually.
And, the thing is, you will find it eventually—if you have readers patient enough to keep you pushing. If you write enough versions of the story, you will eventually get clear on what it's about. That's how I revised my first book, Marilou Is Everywhere. And I love how that book turned out. BUT. I also wrote, no lie, 1,000 pages that didn't go into the final version. That is a LOT, my man. And it's cool, it was the best I could do at the time. But I can tell you why it took me so long, and why I did so much frantic extra work: I was trying to pawn off the task of reading the book clearly to my agent, who, in her great wisdom, kept turning it gently back to me until I could figure out what I wanted the book to say.
Reading—the real reading—is painful because it means coming to terms with the real, present, kinda failed version of the book. You start with this beautiful dream of the book you want to write, but in the process of translating it into actual words, you lose the dream, because the dream is a fluxing and living and ephemeral thing which shapeshifts at will—it can never be perfectly committed to a fixed form like words in sequence on a page, and that's a little bit heartbreaking to realize.
If you want to read like the devil, you must read with a broken heart.
You must write the ending before you can understand the story.
Sometimes I think about stories as containers. They are shaped a certain way so that they can hold, and carry to the reader, a particular kind of cargo. A bucket without a bottom won't carry any water, and a story without an ending won't carry any meaning to a reader.
Your willingness to commit to a version of your book is articulated in its ending. Commitment is painful, because it snuffs out every fantasy version of your book which could exist. And for this reason, writers often sabotage their revisions by leaving the ending in some ephemeral state. Or, nearing the ending, they decide they'll just go back to the beginning and change the whole thing leading up to what they suspect the ending might look like.
If you are doing this, S T O P. I know people who have been working on the same novel for decades because they won't write the ending.
In many ways, the book's ending determines every other decision you must make to get there.
If you haven't written the ending yet, you are not revising your book, you are still writing the first draft.
Everything on the page is there for a reason.
This may seem obvious—but you'd be surprised how often I hear writers brush off comments or questions about the way they arrived at certain images or repeated certain scenes or let a character wander out of one POV into another.
Make no mistake: Every single word and character and bit of white space in a draft is a decision. You must choose one word out of billions, and then choose another word out of billions to put after it, on and on. The book is a record of decisions.
It would be exhausting to make so many decisions consciously. The brain wouldn't or couldn't operate that way, not for long enough to write an entire novel. So where are these decisions coming from? In large part, the decisions come from your subconscious.
And we have lots of reasons for demoting the value of information that comes to us in subconscious ways. For one thing, in a world obsessed with scientific materialism, the idea of an active subconscious is kind of threatening, or “woo-woo,” or silly.
Beside that, decisions are revealing. Just as they say you know a person's character by their actions and not their words, you know your book by its decisions and not by your intent. And you can't write a novel—a whole system of narrative and aesthetic decisions—without rendering a fingerprint of your subconsciousness, your higher self, your soul.
If that sounds a little bit too out there, that's OK. The beautiful thing about axioms is you can borrow them and operate with their guidance before you decide whether they're true for you. Consider it an experiment: What happens when you regard every decision in the novel as significant? In my experience, you will find that you actually have a lot more information about your book than you might think, even (and maybe especially!) if it's a rough first draft.
Your book is about you.
Novels are personal. I know it's become fashionable to pretend that the writer is utterly and completely different from the main character—and to an extent, of course that's true. But it's incredibly frustrating how black-and-white some readers are about the writer's relationship to their book.
On the one hand, people often asked me at readings how I “researched” Marilou Is Everywhere (?? being alive? crying?), and on the other hand, they sometimes assumed that I had experienced the exact same kind of abuse as Cindy, my main character. As with most things in writing, art, life, or whatever, the answer is both/and.
Here's the thing: Writing a novel is hard. It's so hard that you would probably give up unless what you were writing about was vitally important to you, and not vitally important in the sense that you care a great deal about the subject (although you almost certainly do); whether you know it or not, you probably wrote the novel out of some deep personal quandary.
This is true no matter how the subject matter aligns with your own life. Let's say you wrote a historical novel about miners in California during the gold rush. You probably haven't traversed a desert with only a mule for company. You've probably never starved while mining the same barren rock day after day. The book might look absolutely nothing like your life. Except: If you wrote a book about the gold rush, you probably have a deep quandary about how to persist when it looks like you should give up, or how the exploitation of earth's resources brings out the worst in people, or something else related, on a much deeper level, to a matter of huge importance to you personally.
And the fact that it's a quandary means that you didn't know the answer to your question when you began writing it. And so it follows that, in order to finish the book, you have to find the answer to your own question.
The revision process often requires some actual personal growth. The moment of change in a novel may take any number of outward forms, but it is fundamentally and essentially a change in perspective or consciousness on the part of the character. And you can't write that change of perspective unless you've experienced it yourself.
Slowing down will finish faster.
There's a difference between action and activity.
If there's one thing I wish I could tell myself five years ago, when I was getting into major surgery on my first book, it would be this.
I was in a hurry because I didn't like my job, I didn't like my life, and I thought publishing a novel would fix it. I would “show them all.” Show them what, exactly? Show who? I don't know and I still couldn't really tell you, but I was convinced that writing a novel and being a big splashy success was the answer. And I wanted it yesterday.
As a consequence, I wrote draft after draft after draft, each time reacting to my agent's advice or a reader's question, hardly taking the time to sift all of that information and figure out what mattered, and hardly considering the question of what I thought the book was about.
Here's the best free advice anyone could give you about revising a novel: You need a log line.
A log line is nothing more than a sentence which describes a story through its central conflict. You can find perfect examples in any screenwriting book, but they usually go something like this:
When [inciting incident] happens, [protagonist] decides to [take a specific action], in spite of [antagonist].
The beauty of a logline is it forces you to understand the central conflict of your story. And furthermore, it forces you to nail the central conflict. It's hard to write a good log line. It's hard to get such focus and clarity about the story.
In all of my frantic activity, I was actually avoiding the task of understanding the central conflict. I could have saved myself years of work. But I thought that being a “literary” writer exempted me from needing to understand or utilize something as basic as a plot summary. I thought that my book was about lots of things, and in its complexity, I was beyond the petty task of figuring out what it was “about.”
In order to really understand the central conflict, you have to slow down. You have to sit with the story, really look at its moving parts, and discern which of its many gears are actually turning all the smaller ones. You have to really and honestly understand why your characters do what they do. Guessing won't work. It has to be right on the money.
Right now, you might be thinking, “You said this was going to be fun and easy!” Yes, I did—but I didn't promise you it would always be fun and easy at the same time. Figuring out the central conflict isn't easy, but it is fun because it is satisfying. Learning how to construct a narrative feels a lot like solving a puzzle … because it is a puzzle.
Writing is the art of risk.
I've done a lot of Q&A sessions with novelists, teenagers to grad students to pros. And here's the #1 question they all ask:
“How do I know I'm making the right decisions? Should my book be in first person or third? Should it include this flashback or that dream sequence? Does it need to be funnier, more serious, less chatty, longer, shorter? How can I move forward until I know for sure?”
You can't know for sure. That's the risk, and the risk is the beauty.
Words, paint, clay, chords, scales, voice, body—these are all secondary materials in art making. Risk is always the first and most important.
All too often, writers try to fix their books by making them safer. Maybe that means cutting a scene you love but can't explain why. Maybe that means worrying about “what will sell.” Maybe that means writing to please some fussy old English teacher whose voice is still rattling around in your brain. Or maybe that means freezing up because any step in any direction feels too dangerous.
If you try to avoid risk completely while revising your novel, it simply won't happen. Hard stop.
But here's the good news: Risk is fun.
It is serious, utter, sensational fucking fun. Why else do people ride roller coasters or go on first dates or run races or sing karaoke?
A lot of writers get into writing precisely because it seems less risky than, say, playing free jazz or learning how to method act or counting cards at blackjack and getting tossed out of a casino. But don't be fooled: Just because a novel is composed over a controlled interval of time—and the reader isn't there over your shoulder the whole time—doesn't mean that the risk is any less. It's just a different kind.
If you can shift your goal from “staying safe 100% of the time” to “having some fucking fun,” your whole revision process changes.
I can’t promise that this strategy will produce a book that gets a massive advance and sells a million copies. It may in fact do the opposite. This could be a big problem for you from a commercial perspective. After all, we live in an era of Marvel movies swallowing up every other genre until the whole thing becomes its own infinity war. We live in an era where they’re even revamping Lois and Clark: Superman. Grim fucking times for risk. And yet, what are you going to do? Stop breathing?
Another way of saying what I’m trying to say here: Let go of the perfect version of your book which could exist if you got everything right, and write the version of it that’s alive right now. Let the perfect book live in your mind, where it is free of your demands and requirements. If it lives there, maybe you’ll try to write it again next time.
Sarah! This was everything and more I needed to hear. Risk is fucking fun! I’m getting that tattooed on my forehead 🩷