On Sunday, I was on a panel of writers who discussed the ways that revision can lead to a bestseller.
Going in, I was not sure that I could speak with authority on how to write a bestseller. After all, I haven’t written one. I have mostly labored in writing contemporary, literary fiction.
To write a hot bestseller, my main advice would be to switch to a genre like romance or mystery, one that will provide lots of committed readers. Yet I could and can always speak to the virtues of revising ones thoughts and words. Only good usually comes from it.
To begin, one could observe one obvious point. Consider: What exactly do bestsellers, of all genres, have in common? My answer would be that they tell a good story about characters who really matter to readers. That’s the mix–character and story. Perhaps a good story background–place–also matters, if it allows readers to enter a complete secondary world where things happen that we dream about.
These are big concerns. At some writers conferences, speakers will get into debates about what matters more, story or character, but I think that this is setting up a false dichotomy. Both matter. In fact, story, character, and world-building cut across genres, from romance and mystery to crime and fantasy and sci fi. We have to care about the hobbits, or the woman in the car, or the youth baseball team. And something should be happening to them that we have fears or concerns about. Both matter.
I have been on GLAWS panels before (Greater Los Angeles Writers Society), and I enjoy the way that they are facilitated. For Sunday, I planned to be ready to speak of several tricks I’ve practiced: changing the point of view character from one draft to the next, especially in a close third person narration; cutting the opening pages of a draft, the part where introductions and descriptions are gone into, and getting to the scene where the action really starts; then, rethinking the main character’s reactions to things that happen, and rethinking my own reactions about what happens, so that something truly surprising results, surprising to the characters involved, surprising to the author, and then, probably, surprising to the readers.
I have an entire chapter in my writing textbook, Pretexts for Writing, given to steps to revision. It is a most practical chapter, and it begins with the often missed truth that we don’t like to go back and look at our rough drafts. We don’t like to read what we have written. We prefer to bask in the fact that we have finished a draft. And we want to imagine our draft of our story as a completed intention, not something that will benefit from more work.
The first step, then, is to reread a first draft, from start to finish. From there, I like to ask, could another character be the one seeing and telling the story? Does the story begin at the beginning, or does it begin, as Aristotle once intoned, en media res, that is, in the middle, at the start of the conflict? Are more possibilities implicit in that rough draft that I could explore, open up?
Revision, then, becomes more than having my eyes rubbed in my mistakes. It becomes an adventure, a way of seeing the possibilities. It helps to know that there are steps we can take to revisit our writing in new and productive ways.
Tom–Your writing knowledge always sparks something in me. I’ve finished a zero draft that just doesn’t seem immediate enough, and I think I’ll go back and try it from a different point of view–or, maybe, even a different character. Thanks for inspiring me!–Nancy
Nancy, thank you for reading! I can imagine you have many good ideas for approaching that zero draft. I look forward to seeing it when you are done!