Panning for Gold
This is a great exercise to do after a timed free-write or when you are feeling especially critical of a draft or moment you have recently written. For this exercise, you will pan for gold nuggets in your own writing. Take a highlighter and mark every “nugget” of writing that strikes you as gold (this can be a sentence you like, a single word, an exchange between two characters, whatever). Then, choose one of the highlighted “golden nuggets” and put it at the top of a blank page. Begin a new piece that starts at the gold.
Exercise Variation: Write a poem using only the gold.
Marie Kondo Technique
This is a sort of creative decluttering and a favorite exercise of mine for creative nonfiction essays and short stories. For this exercise, take a finished draft and reduce it to half its original size or no more than 750 words. This requires relentless cutting. While not every piece is meant to exist in such a format, trying this exercise out almost always helps you to see the heart of the piece and/or what it is trying to be.
A bonus to this particular exercise is that if it results in a sparkling product at the end there are many literary magazines and online venues that publish works of flash fiction (many publications seek to publish pieces that are 2,000 or less words).
Magnify a Moment
On the flip-side of brevity is zooming in on a moment. This exercise is a practice in showing rather than telling. I am prone to agree with Alice LaPlante that the adage “Show don’t tell,” is flawed. Effective writing requires that the two coexist.
For this exercise, you will focus on “showing.” Start by re-reading your draft and marking any moments where you “tell” the reader something (example: Sue was furious). Then, take one of these tells and turn it into a page-long (at least) show. What senses are heightened in this moment? How does the character’s physiological experience of the world shift? How does their face, voice, stance, etc. transform? What twitches, discomforts, etc. does their body experience in this moment? Answer all these questions and more. Yes, this is probably excessive and indulgent, but it is also fun and great practice. It is a useful exercise in honing your observational skills and rendering them onto the page.
Exercise Variation: Take a fleeting moment in your draft (filling a cup with water) and take at least one page to describe it. Again, this is about capturing the small, overlooked intricacies.
Take it to the Sandbox
This is one of my favorite developmental exercises when I am looking to add depth to a character or situation. Often, my sandbox exercises do not make it into the final draft, but they almost always help inform how the scenes unfold. Sometimes, they even take off into their own pieces. For this exercise, take a secondary character or event and give them space to play without worrying about connecting it back to the draft. For example, a main character refers to having once taken a dance class before while in conversation with another character.
For this exercise, you might make the sandbox you put them in the dance class. Write the scene of your character in that dance class. What was it like? While this may not be important to the story you are working on, it helps you to see more about your character. If you do this exercise with a secondary character, try putting them in the sandbox at their job, alone in their apartment, or in a place the main character would not enter so that the focus can remain on the secondary character. Write into these spaces through the narrative lens of this character. This is a great way to help you better understand secondary characters so that when they enter a scene with your main character they are multidimensional. Even if what happens in the sandbox never sees the light of day, it allows you to have a fuller grasp of the world that your writing inhabits.
https://www.writeordietribe.com/writers-craft/creative-exercises-to-reimagine-revision
The 6 Best Ways to Rewrite Your Book
Create a Scene Map
To gain a better sense of your overall story—including which scenes work and which don’t—make a map of your book.
Write a numbered list of your chapters and scenes. As you go, consider each scene’s importance and effectiveness. Use highlighters to indicate scenes that can be deleted, scenes that can be combined, scenes that are weak, and scenes that are perfect.
Make List of Necessary Changes
Using your map, create a list of directions for your rewrite.
For each scene that needs work, type the number of the chapter and scene (I included a brief description as well, to help me immediately recognize what section I was working on). Beside each scene’s designation, include a brief description of the work to be done: delete; combine with previous scene; delete minor character; change references to main character’s siblings, etc.
I also included some general instructions, at the top of my list, regarding changes I wanted to make throughout to my MC’s character arc, among other things.
https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/rewriting-made-easy/
8 Tips for Revising Your Writing in the Revision Process
Adverbs are the Devil
Lazy writers use adverbs. Period. If you are doing your job well enough, describing the scene and the characters, the reader will understand how an action is performed well enough without any of those -ly words hanging about. Think about these examples below – what sounds better?
“I’ll get you for this!” he said angrily.
He shook his fist, knuckles white with rage, and shouted “I’ll get you for this!”
Same idea, but I think we can agree the second version transmits it with better clarity. Do your best to avoid adverbs. You won’t be perfect – none of us are – but do your best.
Kill Your Darlings
This is the hardest part of revising your writing. Sure, it’s easy to know when your writing is bad, and little is more satisfying than culling the weak from your word-herd. But what about those times when you read your own writing and fall in love…and then suddenly realize that this spectacular bit of prose doesn’t actually belong with the rest of the work. Maybe you could make it fit, or tweak somewhere else to force it to work.
It’s a difficult decision, but in the end the best and simplest way to deal with this scenario is to swipe the red pen and take it out. Aside from the mechanical process of fixing your spelling mistakes and revising for voice, your primary concern during the revision process is to remove everything that isn’t the story.
That means sometimes you have to kill your darlings – those bits of work that really sing, but brought the wrong sheet music to choir practice. If you feel terrible about it, cut and paste into a separate document to look at it later.
Know When to Stop Revising
Remember when we talked about that voice? It can show up during the regular revision process, too. When you get to the end of your second run through the text, you are going to be tempted to go through again. And again. And again.
If your immediate feeling about concluding the revision process is contentment, then stop. Tell yourself that it is good enough. Fix yourself a coffee or a cocktail or whatever you do to celebrate and enjoy the moment. Kick your feet up and relax. You have earned it, my friend!
Open the Door
The last and most stressful part of the whole process is to let someone else have a crack at it. This should be your Designated Reader – a person who knows you; someone you can trust to give honest feedback about your work.
It doesn’t hurt if they have an interest in your genre (and some technical know-how of the craft), but that isn’t totally necessary. If you can watch them read it, don’t. It’s as private a matter for someone to read your work as it was for you to write it.
Give them space and time, and be prepared for feedback of all kinds. If you hit a home run, then great! You’re ready for the next step. If your Designated Reader has some valuable critique, make targeted changes. Remember to know when enough is enough.
https://thinkwritten.com/revising-your-writing/
Creative Writing Revision Exercises
Creative Writing Revision Exercises to Strengthen Character
100 Declarative Sentences
This is a great brainstorm tool, and it’s really hard. This creative writing revision exercise works best with a character or a setting that’s giving you difficulty. Maybe your critique group thinks it’s thin or flat or unconvincing, or it just doesn’t feel right to you. Concentrate on this place or this person and write 100 declarative sentences about her, him or it. Sounds simple, right? Well, it really calls into question how well you know what you’re writing about. A declarative sentence is just an informative sentence that states a fact. Let’s say I have a character called Claire who isn’t working for me. I would start my list:
- Claire plays JV tennis.
- Claire likes to eat ice cream but only after she wins a game.
- Claire wishes she had long hair like Abby does.
Etc. etc. etc. A lot of it will feel like you’re just riffing. You’re making things up. You’re improvising. But you’ll come up with some great surprises, like quirks of a character that you never thought of. Then, around sentence 80, you will feel like you will never finish this stupid exercise. And you will hate me. And you will probably give up and watch some TV. So it goes. But the point here is that you’re thinking of the place or person as something real. Declarative sentences are simple and informational. It will force you to think about things you haven’t been considering yet.
Who knows if you will use all of the 100 things you come up with? But the truth and beauty of fiction always lies in the specifics. Here, you have an opportunity to come up with specifics, quirks, tidbits and other things that will flesh out your character or setting and make them seem more real, more significant. Some of my favorite details about a character or place, the ones that stick with me long after the book is over, are small things like this. That Claire has the purple nail polish chipped off the big toe on her left foot. That Bellmeadows, the town where Claire lives, has three car dealerships but no gas station. Character and setting are in the details. Force yourself to come up with some. You’ll get maybe 10 or 20 new things to add throughout your manuscript.
Creative Writing Revision Exercises to Strengthen Prose
Cut Boring and Ambiguous Words
In my slush pile, I get a lot of queries that use boring and ambiguous words. What do I mean? Here’s an example (an amalgamation of all that is bad, one it has pained me deeply to write):
Johnny learns a mysterious secret at the beautiful Temple of Adventure that will change his life forever. Shadowy conspirators push him into a meaningful choice — and there’s no going back. When Johnny is faced with the truth, dangerous circumstances propel him to a thrilling and exciting climax that will leave readers begging for more.
Huh? What? What is this book about? All I have are general words that are meant to hype me up but they’re all fluff. Just like a booming announcer’s voice during a movie trailer that’s trying to tell me a story, it’s all dazzle and no substance. There are some words that are so general that they mean nothing. Or they mean different things to different people. What one person finds “beautiful” or “thrilling” isn’t the same across the board. Using some in a query or manuscript is okay, but I’m seeing a lot of paragraphs that resemble the above. If I read a paragraph full of generalities and ambiguous words, I really have no idea what your plot is. Plot is made up of specific events, not hot keywords. Avoid these words in your query and in your manuscript. Specifics are key. What does “beautiful” look like to this character? How does that character react uniquely to something “exciting”? Use instances where you’d normally use a boring or ambiguous word as an opportunity to show us something about the characters you’ve created. Striking out these blah words also goes a long way toward adding to voice.
Eliminate Filters
Filters are phrases like “I think” and “I see” and “in my opinion” that dilute your prose. They’re most noticeable in first person but appear in third person, too. For example, it’s a lot more wordy to say, “I saw a dog bounding across the lawn,” than, “A dog bounded across the lawn.” Obviously, the narrator saw it, or they wouldn’t be describing it for the reader. Same with, “I thought her hair looked stupid.” That’s weak compared to, “Her hair looked like a skunk had set itself on fire.” The “I thought” and “I saw” just lessen the impact of what follows. Of course, you’re allowed to say things like, “I thought I saw a ghost,” if they’re important to your plot, but try and weed filters out of your ordinary prose. Tangentially, one of my biggest pet peeves is when writers put: “… blah blah blah, I thought in my head.” Yes. Obviously. What else do you think with? Your elbow?
Reading Aloud
As many readers have mentioned in comments, a nifty trick for how to rewrite a novel is reading your manuscript aloud. Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, you sometimes lose your voice doing it, but you catch so many things you never would’ve caught before. My favorite thing to do — during workshop and critique sessions — is to actually have another person (or, you know, if you’ve got such a patient person at your disposal at all times) read your manuscript or parts of it to you. This is extremely instructive. You hear it in another voice (one that’s not inside your head) and you get to see where you reader stumbled or seemed to get caught up in certain sentences. You get to see if another voice makes the prose come alive (which means it has voice of its own) or if it lies flat on the page and makes your reader start droning.
https://kidlit.com/brainstorms-and-tips/
Revision Strategies
Find a Way Into the Text
If you’re starting with a character sketch: what does she want? What
does he believe? For an instant plot, put an obstacle between the
character and her desire, or place him in a situation that will test his
beliefs and code of behavior.
If you’re starting with a piece of dialogue, weave in elements of
minute action: someone changing a tire, or making a sandwich. The
idea isn’t to create an action scene out of a conversation, but to start
illuminating the speakers and to give you additional material to work
with.
If you have a setting sketch, fill it chock-full of objects that both reveal
information and can be used later. Put a vase on a table so we know
someone likes pretty things, but also so it can be thrown and broken.
Getting off topic: let your writing wander. If nothing seems surprising or unexpected to you, it will probably also seem dull to your reader.
KC Storytellers 