41. Unconventional Revision Strategies
You wrote it, so now fork and rewrite it.
Revising a piece of writing is like restoring an old building. When a building has good bones, it would be a mistake to change things around too much, to "update" it to the latest design standard, and forsake what it was built to be.
There’s no such thing as a correct building, only beautiful and functional ones. The same is true with a piece of writing.
Most of my writing tends to come out in one form and must be reshaped into another. Although the spirit of the finished piece may be there in the rough draft, it wouldn't be apparent to the reader until I reworked the wording, reordered the sentences, and reshaped the structure.
Revision is sometimes about me discovering what the piece wants to be, and at other times, it's about making it more apparent to the reader. There’s not really a one-size-fits-all revision strategy. It depends on the draft and what you want to do with it.
Here are a few techniques for revision based on different types of writing.
How to revise a piece that feels finished (but it’s not)
Most unfinished writing is easy to spot because it's rough, full of holes, and disordered.
But sometimes, you write something, and it looks polished and complete. There's nothing for a middle school English teacher to complain about—no grammar mistakes or usage errors. Everything is properly indented. But that doesn't mean it's world-changingly good.
It’s a false finish. Words dressed in the veneer of done-ness.
At times, a piece appears finished simply because it has sat around for a while, and you’ve gotten used to it being how it is. Let's say you wrote a poem and hung it on the fridge. The longer it stays there, the more you'll get used to it being just how it is.
Revising finished work can be challenging because you have to find your way beneath how the scar tissue of time formed over it.
You can do this by changing something arbitrarily. If the poem was typed, write it out by hand. Narrate it into a voice recorder while sitting in your garage in the rain. Do something different. Take a different perspective. Become a different person.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
- Pablo Picasso
Let it age in a quiet, dark place
When you let something sit for a time before reading it again, you're giving yourself a different vantage point from which to appraise it. When you find yourself confronting an old draft, it's worth emphasizing that it's good to be kind to yourself and the nascent piece of writing. Choose to re-experience the work instead of merely judging it from on high. It’s a work in progress. If it can be resolved, this will happen through the creative mode.
You may even want to take things in multiple directions (see the forking example below).
My preference, by far, is to write a rough piece until I know I've expressed its full superstructure and key elements. I let my writing stay rough until I reach this phase, and then I let it breathe.
Much like what happens when making pottery. I throw something on the wheel, and I’m finished once I have the shape and size of it. I let that piece dry until it gets leather-hard and then trim away excess material.
Rewrite it
Another approach to revision is to write the first draft, then later read through it, identify what's good, simply note what's useful and interesting, and then write again.
Now that you have those ideas top-of-mind, you can start over and take another full rough draft. This second pass is another first draft but with better top-of-mind bullet points. It can make all the difference.
Forked revisions
Years ago, I wrote a novel very quickly in response to writing prompts. The novel took on a very strange style as a result. The story was set in the recent past and was more or less realistic. The plot took peculiar turns, although no more so than many movies have habituated us to believe are plausible.
I was happy with the story in that form, but I wanted to do something else with it. So, I left that draft as-is and, to use a software engineering term, "forked" it.
I'll digress a bit to explain what forking is. Many writers might not be aware of how collaboration works among software developers. If you take a given software application, it consists of many files in a central repository. Suppose a team of engineers is working on an application at the same time. Everyone has a copy of the same set of files. One developer writes a new set of functions and then commits their changes to the repository, which can then get pushed to the master version of the application. Meanwhile, another developer separately working on the application can more or less seamlessly pull down those changes into their own version and update the master branch with their own changes without creating an issue. Version control software keeps track of all the changes everyone makes and ensures that only the desired changes get made to the main version, and these changes get reflected in everyone's version of the application.
It's complicated only because it needs to be.
Under this same system, in the open source world, you can take someone's application and "fork" it. In other words, take a copy of everything that it is at that point in time, and bring it to your local machine. With this copy, you can add and change things and take things in a completely different direction. These forked changes don't affect the main version because they happen on different forks of the road, so to speak.
If engineers do it all the time with code libraries, why not do the same with your writing?
Keep one version as-is
Remix a cloned version in a different way
Remix your own work
Remember the peculiar realistic novel I mentioned above? I like it how it is. But I also knew it had some potential to be remixed into something different. So, I forked this novel into a science fiction version of the same story. It was weird in the first version, and it was even weirder in the second. Fair enough. So guess what I'm going to do?
I’ll remix it. This time more in the spirit of The Princess Bride.
Forking is a great exercise in exploring a given story and feeling it out for different possibilities.
In a realistic world, a story's stakes work one way, but if the same events happen in a science fiction world, I have other options for moving the same chess pieces around the board.
Forking it created whole different characters, one of which I'd very much like to validate with a story of his own. Remixing the remix.
The takeaway here is that interesting things happen when you choose to see each step of the writing process as equally creative.
Whether a story works in remixed form probably has everything to do with how much you like it and what it gets you to tap into.
What do you think of the forked writing approach? If you've done something similar, or if you have comments, let me know what you think about this approach.
To recap:
Write and complete something. Make it stand on its own.
Release it into the wild, as desired.
Fork it. Revisit a version of it and take it in a dramatically different direction. This can be anything from the director's cut to a completely different story. Make a fantasy into sci-fi, make the good guy the bad guy, have musical interludes, and change the stakes entirely.