Hello, writers. I’m working on a revision right now of a book that’s under contract. A revision can seem like a monolith, an unscalable glass mountain, a literary Annapurna. The best thing to do, I find, is break it down.
So I’m working on a scene list.
I went through the manuscript and identified each scene, giving it a number and a brief description. There are 73 scenes in all, ranging in length from 24 words to over 1000.
As I did this, I realized that some of the scenes don’t need any revision at all. Already, the prospect looks brighter. Annapurna becomes Denali.
Next, I color-code the throughlines in the list. The development of one plotline is pink. A recurrent mystery is orange. The protagonist’s growth and change is green. As I look at the scene list now, I can see places where an aspect of the story has been left dangling for too long— there’s no orange for a whole long space in the middle. Too much pink here, not enough green.
I’ll list the characters in each scene. If someone’s gone missing for too long, I can see it on my list and bring him/her back in, if only as a brief mention.
When something major happens in a scene, I can look at the list and see whether I built up to it properly in the preceding scenes.
To finish my list, I'll identify the purpose of each scene. How does it move the story forward? If it doesn’t, if it’s just a side excursion, then it may need to get the chop. If two scenes move the story forward in exactly the same way, they’ll need to be combined. The numbers make this easier— it’s much easier to sit down and combine scene 14 with scene 28 than it is to “try to spend less time on the ship” or some similarly vague instruction.
The scene list; don’t stay home without it.
Since the above doesn’t lend itself to a tonight’s challenge, try this:
Write a scene in which a character realizes something is dreadfully wrong. Make it exactly 100 words in length.
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