A Revision Practice in Three
Exercise One
How often have you considered the use of time as an element to evaluate when you revise your manuscript? As a storytelling element, time can establish a story’s momentum, benchmark plot points, and measure the effects of life-changing events. When used effectively, your readers will never notice. When not, they will be confused and question the plausibility of the story arc or plot.
If you missed our workshop at the Atlanta Book Festival, we explored ways to use time to shape mood, pacing, and tension in our stories, creating immersive experiences for our readers. I’ve updated the workshop into a short series so that you can use this practice to revise your drafts.
Read and Reflect
In the revision step, we evaluate overarching concerns of our story’s content and structure. We solidify styling decisions, identify underdeveloped plot points and overexplained emotions, eliminate redundancies, and address unbelievable motives.
To complete this exercise, first select one of your drafts to revise. Read it. Then reflect on and answer the following questions:
When writing your draft, did you focus more on action, dialogue, description, or reflection?
Does your story focus more on a character, an event, or an emotion?
Where does your story spend most of its time: the past, present, or future?
Does your story take place over seconds, minutes, hours, days, or years?
What does the reader know about when the story takes place?
Where does time seem to move quickly? Where does it seem to slow down?
Are your characters mostly focused on the present moment, a memory from the past, concern about the future, or some combination of all three?
These questions help us understand our writing process and solidify context, perspectives, and circumstances for our character(s). When writing your answers, be specific, be decisive, and be open to change if something is no longer relevant. Keep the answers; they will come in handy when you create your editing style sheets.
After each question has been answered, use what you discovered to revise your draft!
