The Writing Lab, 15 March 2025
A brand new feature on The Writing Life.
Welcome to a brand new experiment here at The Writing Life.
Experiment might be a bit too bold of a word. What I’m thinking of might be an adjustment or a refinement. Frankly, just doing a regular newsletter even twice a month seems to be a bit of repetitiveness (imagine if I were still doing it once a week lol). I want to provide a bit more value for subscribing to me, even if it’s a free subscription in your case.
So, I’ve decided to invite you into my virtual writing lab. My actual writing lab, my regular writing space, is the deep dark basement of my home (actually, it has some pretty extensive lighting if I turn it all on). But now you can enter a virtual writing lab, where I discuss some of the tricks of the trade I’ve learned over the past 30 or so years of writing and some of the struggles I’ve undergone along the way.
AMAAW (Ask Me Anything About Writing)
In addition to this post, I am going to start an open chat in Substack chat, which will be a AMAAW thread. I’m open to any questions about writing, or if you have some ideas that you want to have a beta reader for. Shoot, if you want to ask me if your research paper is looking good, I’ll do that. I just want to interact with some writers and talk shop.
I’ll be online by 7 p.m. Central Time tonight. Hope to see you there.
For the first of these Writing Labs, I decided to touch on a subject I’m knee-deep in during the next few months I’ve been working on what I’ve been calling The Yank Striker 2, and it’s what I often call the real heart of writing - revisions. Call this Part 1 in an extended review of the subject.
On Revising, Part 1 (of ?): The basics
I suppose you could currently classify me as a writing teacher because I do teach students writing skills. However, as a special education teacher, I wind up teaching or at least reteaching a wide amount of subjects. But, for much of my earlier time as a teacher, I often taught writing to students from middle school to the junior college level.
During the time that I taught in the college environment, I always wanted to lay out what the writing process looked like, in a similar manner that Vince Lombardi would explain to his players what a football was before beginning practice. As part of that, I'd include a graphic in my PowerPoint to the class where I would illustrate that writing process to the class. It looked like this:
This is about as simple a representation of the writing process there is. The steps are:
Prewrite - coming up with your idea and making initial plans for what it will look like.
Draft - putting the first version of your writing down on paper/computer screen/etc.
Revise - reviewing your work for possible improvements regarding its ideas, organization, or style.
Edit - reviewing your work for grammatical, mechanical, or formatting errors.
Publish - putting your final version of your work out for the general public to see.
For most people, steps 1 and 2 are usually the only ones they might think of or heard of. You think of something, you write it down - easy enough.
But it's not that easy. Even the above diagram only hints at that complexity. For example, right after step 4, we could easily loop back to step 3 for another go-around, and then yet another. Professional novelists usually go through several revisions and edits for a single book; I've heard of some screenplays with a dozen or more.
My personal experience with writing and teaching writing for the past 30 years or so has left me convinced revising is the absolute key step to the writing process. It's the engine driving everything else. It's where you look at all the drivel you've dribbled onto the paper and screen and try not to recoil in horror. If drafting is taking a whole stack of 3x5 cards covered in notes, flinging them into the air, and letting them scatter across a table, revising is sorting all those cards out and seeing how they relate to each other.
So, what exactly does revising cover? What is part of this part of the process?
Ideas - Essentially anything involving the substance of what you write. This includes:
Your main character. Is he sympathetic? Is he unlikable, and is it a problem for your story? (Sometimes it is.) Does his motivation make sense? Is his path through the plot clear?
Do you spend too little time developing your supporting characters or too much time? Either one could be a problem. Do you even need some of them, or do all those characters crowd out the story?
Are there any difficulties with your setting? For fantasy and science fiction writers, you are going to have to spend much more time with world building so your readers have some clue to where everything is taking place.
Do you have a clear handle on your plot and major plot points? Is there a lot of time in the middle where not much happens? Maybe you need to tighten things up.
Are those subplots making the story interesting or are they too distracting? Do you have a subplot that could make a better book than the one you’re working on right now? Maybe you need to chuck the old story in the slush pile and try the new shiny subplot instead? You never know.
Organization - How your story is structured and its size. This can include:
Is your story divided into too many chapters or too few?
Can readers follow the structure of your story even if you don’t tell it in a linear format?
How big is your word count? Is it too big or small for the genre (Fantasy or mainstream fiction) or medium (short story, novella, or novel)?
Style - This gets into the feel of your story, how you use words, and how your personality is expressed in your work. For example:
The length of your sentences. You can write short sentences. It’s all right to write long, long sentences stretching over inch after inch of page space, seemingly making up their own paragraphs in the space of time. You can even write sentences some might call medium in length. But it gets entirely boring when you write an entire short story, never mind novel, with sentences of the same length and structure.
What words do you choose to describe a scene or a person? You can’t just use the same words repeatedly, because it becomes as boring as the same sentence lengths. The thesaurus is your friend when it comes to revising.
How do you express your personality in how you write? That can filter into anything from your subject matter, the dialogue of your characters, or (like the Hong Kong film director John Woo) you are a fan of action scenes with men wielding twin guns and leaping through the air in rooms filled with doves.
It absolutely does not involve editing: Basically, all the mechanics, grammar, and formatting. That comes in Step 4.
That’s enough of the basics to get you thinking. Next time, I’ll start discussing some of techniques and procedures I’ve used on my own work, especially during the past several years. Even if they might not work for you, maybe they will give you some ideas for your own revisions.