Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Rebel's Rules of Ardor

This is the last night of workshops for the 2008 conference. Having started on Saturday night, before the morning and afternoon workshops began, I am in the unfamiliar place of being one of the first to be through instead of the last. Tomorrow, I can even sleep late and begin catching up with the onset of Summer routine. All that is needed is a rousing souvenir of a mini lecture with which to leave them before hearing out the last round of manuscript reading and commentary. Thus I propose:

Revision

1. Revision is a systematic and purposeful process of taking in the opening drafts of a work, digesting it elements, then determining what it is...

2. ...then determining where it really begins, which is to say finding the place where it begins to pulse and exert energy. This place may be anywhere within the manuscript, including where you may at one time have thought it to end...

3. then determining if it is told from the optimal point of view, which is to say that, for example, at least one segment of Mr. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury had to be told from the point of view of Benjy Compson...

4...then determining if all the participants in the narrative have earned their way into it and deserve to remain, checking to see if two or perhaps even three or four characters have been assigned the same role and need to be either combined or otherwise surgically separated...

5...then determining if they speak dialogue as opposed to conversation...

6...then determining if each scene earns its keep, which is to say it advances the story, enhances our understanding of the characters, and defines however minimally the emotional landscape...

7...then checking to see that some significant discovery occurs to the writer from having so intimately dealt with such exquisitely formed and dramatically displayed characters, the idea being that the author has reached deeply enough within him--or herself to have learned some answer, gained some new insight, or forsworn some prejudicial road block that will more readily allow the traffic of reason and learning...

8...then discovering some surprise, some delightful or momentous awareness that as not there but which advanced the characters joint originality and the author's understanding of the human condition...

9...then determining where the narrative truly ends, a safeguard against anticlimax, which is, by all accounts the introduction of distractions to the main story arc and embellishments...

10...then checking to remove the one or two things set into the narrative as a hedge against disinterest because where risks are taken, safety is the primary concern and a thing that is safe is fine in commercial vehicles and investments but not in writing, never, never in writing.

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