About the Final Fiction Revision
The General Assignment: From any of the four fiction pieces you’ve written so far, choose one to revise. Do three Fiction Experiments from the list provided below, and do everything else you can to revise this piece into something finished and polished. It can remain as a series of scenes, or you can work toward a finished story. See further explanation below.
Points: 40
Deadline: 9am, Monday, Week 11.
Format and order: The Revision Reflection and the Final Revision should be double-spaced. Include all elements below in a single .doc or .rtf file, in this order, from top to bottom.
1. Your Revision Reflection (about 500-700 words) This is a narrative in which you describe your revision process. Talk about how you developed your piece, what choices you made, what revision experiments you tried, and what their effects were. Talk about how you decided, after all the experiments, what your final piece should be. The more detail here, the better, as detail reveals your involvement with the revision process. Like the poetry revision Reflection, this is a very in-depth look at your revision process.
2. Following that, include your brilliant, wonderful, original, and polished Revision.
3. Following that, include the three Revision Experiments.
4. Following that, include other notes and drafts, if any exist.
What is a revision? Your revision might end up adding scenes, and making your piece longer, taking the story further. Or it might not--you might still stay with the same basic scenes. Either way, the piece will be worked with extensively. In this class, a revision is a piece of writing that you’ve thought about, re-worked, re-made, and thought about some more until your head explodes. You probably have some changes that you know you want to make—things that have come up in your workshop discussion and from my feedback, so your revision will likely make those changes. But I would also like you to take this opportunity to enlarge your imagination of what your story might be, and to let yourself create something you couldn't have thought of when you first started.
Your revision might end up using a lot of the resulting material—or it might not. Either way, you’ll have made some discoveries about what’s possible. The experiments are to help you find depth in your work, to help you find things in it that you don't know yet are there, to enable you to find more ways to write. Consider the following:
· A good piece of fiction is so original it makes us shiver and tingle. Even if it uses age-old plot elements, something about the approach is new and interesting.
· The way the words are put together surprises us--the words are really working to get across something this author and only this author could say.
· The story goes where we wouldn't expect, or it gets to an expected place in a surprising way.
· Often something about the writing surprises the writer too--the characters took on lives of their own, or the story touched something deep that the writer didn't know it was going to.
· Everything in it counts, every word, image, and action.
· Everything in it not only counts, but counts double--for example, description can carry the plot forward, dialogue can deepen the conflict, etc.
· Also, a revision should use the elements of craft we've been learning about it Burroway:
· Show Show Show! Use detail, image, gesture, dialogue, and action to convey the story. Tell a story in specific scenes that dramatize the main events of the story.
· Use narration and summary where you want to move quickly to the next scene, cover something that's not a main turning point, or provide some background information. However, first make sure it wouldn't be better to convey this information by showing.
· Consider all the ways or showing character, and of using fictional place and time.
· Make sure the point of view is consistent and believable. If you shift points of view, make sure the shift is clear to the reader.
· Clear up confusions readers might have.
· Edit your dialogue tags: Always try to get the dialogue and action to convey what's going on, rather than the letting the dialogue tag do the work. Compare ""You make me mad," he said angrily,' to '"I can't stand this," he said, sweeping his arm across the table so all the dishes crashed to the floor.' Sometimes you don't need dialogue tags at all.
· Go over every word carefully and make sure you need it. Rewrite and reshape sentences so that every word adds something.
· Make sure any errors in grammar or spelling are deliberate, serving a purpose, required to convey voice and character.
Grading of the Revision
Reflection, 5 points. The reflection describes your revision process detailing your experiments and their results, discussion your decisions, and showing you actively involved with every word of your piece; it shows how you have urged your piece to find its true being, meaning, language, tone, imagery, music, and form. If you have purposely used unconventional grammar or punctuation or formatting, discuss your reasons here.
The depth of the experimentation, 15 points: The three experiments are included, and drafts are both included and described in your Reflection. The drafts and experiments show you working not only with small-scale decisions of word-choice and sentence, but also with the larger development of theme or idea. The drafts show you discovering what the story wants to be and do. Your whole revision package shows that you have deeply explored the possibilities of your work, tried this and that, adding material, taking material away, evaluating each change and deciding what to do with it. The revision shows that each word, sentence, image, or action has been chosen for its effect on the reader and on the piece as a whole.
The quality of the result, 15 points: The revision should show that you have worked to improve the quality of your writing, practicing to
· express yourself by means of image, and action, and the music of language rather than by generalization; to show rather than to tell;
· use sentence rhythms to convey meaning;
· make every word count, and count double, using language compactly;
· eliminate clichés;
· consider the elements Burroway addresses: creating believeable characters and dialogue, establishing the location, managing time with scene and summary, developing conflict.
· clarify distracting confusions;
· create a strong opening and a strong ending;
· surprise yourself
· and last but not at all least, the revision shows that you have tried your best to be brilliant and original, to say new things in new ways, to get at complex meanings that you may not have known about when you started, which only literature is complex enough to express. Take risks with your writing!
Polish of surface, 5 points: The revision has been carefully proofread. It finds and corrects unintentional errors of grammar and syntax. The revision's appearance on the page is as you intend. Variations on conventional grammar and punctuation are explainable according to the demands of form and tone and voice and character. I recommend that if you are using intentional unconventional elements (for example sentence fragments, grammar errors, lack of punctuation, or partial punctuation), you discuss them in your Reflection to let me know that they are deliberate. Otherwise, if they read to me like mistakes, I will assume they are mistakes, and grade accordingly.
Fiction Revision Experiments
Instructions: Choose at least three of these experiments to work with during your fiction revision process. You may do more!
The general idea: During your revision process, you will make a mess. You might have one paragraph of the original followed by several pages of freewriting that expands on some nugget in that paragraph. You might try adding sections, developing fragments or images. You might urge a scene toward a whole story, making characters more real, adding scenes, developing conflict. You might insert motifs here and there. You might free-write on an image in a story and see if you come up with things you can use in the revision. You could rewrite the same scene or fiction piece, but this time with more knowledge of where it's going and what it's about, so that every detail is focused toward a central theme or conflict.
At several stages of revision, your piece will probably be in shreds and bits. You will feel like you’re starting over and the whole thing is crap. You will have no idea if you’re making it better or worse. That’s how it is. Just keep on going!
The Experiments
(not in any particular order)
1. Do everything your readers suggest: Follow the suggestions of any comments you received, then make your own decision about whether they work or not.
2. If the original version didn't precisely follow the assignment, write a version that more closely follows the assignment, and see what happens.
3. Edit out every word or phrase that seems the least bit dull or familiar. Decide if it needs replacing with something more original, or if it was better the way it was, or if it is necessary at all.
4. Make a map or outline of your plot, showing where the moments of conflict are (internal or external, between characters or within a character, and showing where power shifts between characters. Who is “winning” at any one moment?
5. Make a map or outline of your plot, showing where there is connection or disconnection between characters. At what moments to characters connect? Where do they reject each other? Is someone included or excluded?
6. Experiments with scenes: Stories are usually told by means of scenes. What scenes already exist in your story? Could any of these scenes be expanded so as to accomplish more? What if your story were to be told by means of other scenes? Which would they be? Are there undeveloped places in your story that would be interesting to develop into full-fledged scenes? What would happen if some currently minor places in the story got developed into lengthy scenes? What would happen if what currently is told by means of summary and narration were to be illustrated in a scene instead?
7. Follow the original assignment even more strictly and carefully.
8. Interleaving expansions: Read your piece carefully, hunting for every word or phrase that seems even the slightest bit general, or that you have even the slightest inclination to say more about. Look for those places where you may have been in a hurry during the early drafts, or where you may have given up in the frustration of trying to describe things accurately. Insert after every one of these, more detail, development, description, imagination--whatever is appropriate for the situation. As you do this, you may discover that you can cut out the original generality and substitute one of these other images. Or you may discover an idea or theme you didn't know was there. Or?
9. Highlight all uses of the verb "to be" in any form. Cut them and focus on using a more active, dynamic verb. do the same thing with any use of the verb "to become." To do this, you’ll probably have to radically rearrange syntax; simply substituting other verbs doesn’t necessarily do the trick.
10. What if the piece has a different source, a different motive? Rewrite the story or poem as if it is a message to your lover. As if it is to your mother. As if it is to a stranger. As if someone else is telling the story.
11. Order and sequence: Change the order of things around. For example, let the story begin with what's now the last scene, or put the current opening scene in the middle. What does changing the order tell you about your meaning? How might changing the order affect the reader's experience?
12. Freewrite on a motif or symbol: Let yourself write as much as you can, brainstorming about all the different forms your motif or symbol can come in, and what it might mean. For example, I'll start a freewrite on the motif of "lips": Certainly they're on people. Lipstick prints on glasses. The lip of a tunnel or hole--scary, the unknown, a turning point. Don't give me any of your lip. Fat lips, thin lips. Thin lips--anger or prudery...
13. Research an element of your piece: Maybe there's a subject in your story interesting to know more about, or that you need vocabulary for. If you're writing about a character who's having chemotherapy, it might to interesting to know more details about how chemotherapy works, for example.
14. Let your characters dream: Write down your characters' (or speaker’s) dreams. Be loose, wild, imaginative; don't worry about meaning or believability. Read over what you've written. Possible you'll be able to include one of these dreams in your fiction. Or maybe you can include some of the elements of these dreams in other ways. For example, if your character has a dream of a flight of crows blocking the sky, maybe you can make her black hair shine like crow feathers, or her eyes take a long time to adjust to the darkness in a room when she suddenly comes in out of the sun. If a character dreams that she can't get out the door and go to work because she can't find her shoes, and then when she does find them there are two left ones only, and then when she finds a right shoe it has no laces, you can give your character some similar kind of shoe problem as she's getting ready to go to work. See if you can use the images from the dreams in any way that helps to develop the conflict or the characters in your story.