There are two types of writing resources you look for when you’re revising: resources on the revision process and resources about craft. The first relates only to revision but the second can be used in planning, writing and revising a story.
You don’t have to research long to find the top-down approach to revision (as outline by Merrilee for Project 2012) is the most popular, if only for its efficiency. However, there are a myriad of ways to work your way through those layers of your story including how you define those layers and how many layers you end up with.
How To Revise Your Novel* by Holly Lisle
Holly’s approach to novel revision starts with discovering the story you meant to write. As you read through you’ll know when the story you actualy wrote does and doesn’t match up to the story you meant to write.
Holly leads writers through identifying the promises they’ve made to readers in the story. This makes sure that you’ve made good on all your promises but is absolute magic in fixing plot holes and adding layers to your story.
She gives lessons on triage across scenes, plot, conflict, characters, world and theme as well as providing her own published novels as illustration. She works in a planning, write in, type in structure that can ultimately be made into a one pass revision process. Now that’s efficient revision.
When it comes to resources on structure and craft there are dozens of different approaches. The trick is to read widely, choose the ones that make sense to you and try them out. Then you can add what works for you and your stories into your own writing repertoire.
In my revision spreadsheet I’ve introduced several different concepts (The Sentence, sub-plots, internal/external conflict, Goal-Motivation-Conflict). As I’ve progressed with my read through I’ve realised that if I populate The Sentence for each scene I’ll be able to identify the sub-plots from that information later. It’s the same with character. If I’ve documented the scenes I’ll be able to follow a particular character through the story and determine their goal, motivation, conflict and resolutions.
How To Think Sideways* by Holly Lisle
The Sentence comes from Holly Lisle’s course How To Think Sideways and can be used to describe the whole story all the way through the layers (parts, chapters, etc) to each individual scene. It’s a single sentence made up of five elements: Protagonist, Antagonist, Conflict, Twist & Setting.
Protagonist with a need versus antagonist with a need in interesting setting… with twist.
For a scene what actually happens in the scene is: the protagonist versus the antaognist in an interesting setting. The most important part of a scene is to move the story forward and to do that something fundamental needs to change. That is the twist.
Once I’ve finished the read through I want to use my revision spreadsheet to map my plot and characters into different structures. By looking at my story from so many different angles I hope to expose it’s weaknesses and gather ideas to improve the story.
- Main plot and sub-plots
- Internal/External conflict
- Story Structure from Larry Brooks at Storyfix.com
- Separation, Descent, Ordeal, Resolution model as described by Martina at Adventures in YA & Children’s Publishing
- The Hero’s Journey
- Alexandra Sokoloff’s Narrative Structure Cheat Sheet
- Goal, Motivation, Conflict by Debra Dixon
The participants of Project 2012 share more writing resources here. http://notenoughwords.
* Join Holly Lisle’s courses now and get access to many bonus lessons and writing forums. Later in February they will only be available in ebook form with the primary course material only.