Tag Archives: drafts

08.11.26
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Revisionism

First you write. Then you REVISE. Then you edit and publish.

Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov. Painting by Ivan Kulikov (1875–1941). Public Domain.

Because revision is an essential step, many writing gurus today advise: “Write your first draft from beginning to end at blazing speed, just to get it down. Stop for nothing—research, grammar, structure, polish—just get it down. It’s great for your first draft to be total crap. You will fix it in the revision phase.”

Your New Favorite Writer does not buy this. Your New Favorite Writer has never bought this. I know of no way to write but with extreme care, right from the start. Gentle Reader, if I had my way, I would write a perfect first draft and have no need for revision. But I am incapable of such a feat. 

Thus I revise, over and over again, while producing the first draft of a novel. I go back, re-read the little bit I have written, and improve it based on new insights. Then I go on and write a little bit more. 

Using this method, by the time I complete the “first draft” of my novel, what I really have is a fifteenth draft of the early parts, tenth drafts of other parts, sixth drafts of other parts—and virtually no portion of the work that is fresh off my keyboard as a virgin first draft. 

Here I stand. I can do no other. (Luther is reputeded to have said that, and I echo him.) 

Once I have this multi-layered apparent first draft—what do you think? It still needs revision! Lots of it. I’m talking about author’s revisions, before we get to copy-editing and proofreading. 

Let’s raise a toast to the Revision Phase—99 percent drudgery and 100 percent sheer joy.

How Does it Work?

Here’s how it works:

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I place my cursor at the top of Page One. Then, using the “Find” feature of my word processor, I search for every example of “ly” in the whole manuscript. The two letters “ly” commonly appear at the end of adverbs. There are some adverbs that do not end in -ly, like “slow”, “fast”, “often”, etc. And there are -ly words that do not happen to be adverbs, like “lily” or “family.” But most of the -lys I turn up will be adverbs. I examine each -ly word in the whole manuscript, all 342 of them, checking whether it justifies itself or whether that sentence can be written better. 

Why do this? Adverbs can easily sap one’s prose of vitality. It is all too easy to sprinkle your writing with suddenlys, quicklys, smilinglys, and so on. Removing many of these adverbs will make your prose read stronger. Sometimes, you need the meaning of the adverb, but there is a better way to provide it: for example, by choosing a more precise verb. Instead of  “He ran quickly to the scene of the fire,” you can write “He raced to the scene of the fire.” 

Now, here’s the tricky part: There are adverbs that are necessary and justified. Identifying those, picking them out from the disposable ones, is why we writers are paid, as you know, fabulous sums of money. 

Having thrown out every ill-advised -ly adverb in the whole manuscript, I go back to Page One.  Now, I insert “ing” into the Find box. As with “ly,” there are innocent words that happen to include “ing,” like “spring” or “harbinger.” But most words that end -ing are gerunds (derivative nouns made from verbs), present participles (derivative adjectives made from verbs), or present progressive verbs (“I’m singin’ in the rain”). Many of these -ing words are accomplices in the mugging of otherwise healthy prose. Once again, I interrogate each one I find, asking, “Are you really necessary? Or can I say this better without you?” Each one, that is, in the whole manuscript, naturally.

Back to Page One to look for ands. Then ors. Then buts. Some are indispensable, but a lot of those conjunctions just force two sentences together that ought to stand alone. Each conjunction must justify itself, OR ELSE.

Next, I scan for “is.” Often, that little linking verb is just a way to change colorful action into pallid assertion. Likewise for all its irregular variants—was, are, were, etc. Each one, in the whole manuscript, must be tracked down and made to answer for itself. I show them no mercy. 

Oh, and then sensory words like “saw,” “heard,” “felt,” “tasted,” “knew.”  

“What’s wrong with those?” you ask. When positioned to act as filters, they remove the reader from direct immersion in the scene. Compare:

Sam Spade smelled dead fish as he stepped on to the wharf. 

OR,

The harbor reeked of rotting cod.

The first is a third-person report of the  character’s sensory intake. The second actually delivers the smell, from the character’s perspective. Either approach, in a given context, might be the right one. Your job is to know which one it is, in this particular context. That’s why we authors, of course, achieve fame and glory. You must make this choice for each example of sensory words, in the whole manuscript.

There other kinds of words and expressions I search for, throughout the whole manuscript, in this way. I won’t continue to bore you with them. But I must bore myself with them, because detailed attention to—well, the details—helps make a manuscript great. 

The Second Part

Here’s a kind of reward: Having ferreted out all those little word choices and whipped them into shape, I get to do the fun part. 

Back to Page One. But now, instead of searching for single words or phrases, I read my book, as a unified whole, from start to finish, for the first time. Now, I feel for the flow of language, the logic of scenes and descriptions, the power of syntax, the credibility of motives, the rhythm of rising and falling tension and conflict. I try to take it all in and improve it as I go along. 

After this final pass of revision, maybe, just maybe the book is ready to show to my publisher.

That’s the fun part. Just in itself, it takes a lot of time. But if I do it right, it adds to my riches and fame.

Why Burden You With All This?

At the very least, Your New Favorite Writer finally got this off his chest. 

Now, Dear Reader, you have some idea why it takes so long to write a book. 

So, when it finally goes to print, please buy a copy. Read it, love it, review it, and sell it incessantly to all your friends. Help me become rich and famous.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.17.23
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Writing a Historical Novel

Dear Reader: This is a Friday Reprise of material originally posted on 28 May 2019. It’s amusing to read it now, because when this was written, I thought the book was done. I had no idea! At any rate, hope you enjoy the retrospective.

Three and a half years ago, in January 2016, I retired from other pursuits so I could try to write fictional stories that other people would like to read. 

Coastal village in Norway. “Enligt AB Flygtrafik Bengtsfors: ‘Havstenssund’.” by G. AB Flygtrafik Bengtsfors / Bohusläns museum is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

After a few small success with short stories, I got the idea to write a historical novel based on my ancestors Anders Gunstensen and Maria Nybro, who came to Illinois from Norway in the 1850s. We had scant information about their lives—a few dates,  places, and milestones—not much more. Not enough real knowledge to support a detailed, book-length factual account of their lives—even if I had wanted to write one. But what I actually wanted was to use the bare facts as a framework on which to hang a made-up story, through which we might discover the world in which they lived.

I spent more than six months on the trail of Anders and Maria. I struggled to imagine a plot around the known and unearthed events of their lives that would make a good fictional story, yet would not much distort the known facts. At last, early in 2017, I began to write text. 

Me writing.

The first draft of this novel, Freedom’s Purchase, took more than a year to write, at a steady rate of 1,500 to 2,000 words per week.This time also included research “on the fly” to support the detailed demands of particular scenes in the story.

My writing process is iterative. Contrary to what many great writers recommend, I invest a lot of time and effort, while laying down the first draft, in simultaneously revising passages already written. So by June 2018, when I finished the “first draft” of the novel, it was really anywhere between a fifth and a fifteenth draft, depending which part of the book you’re looking at. 

I loved my book so much that I started to query agents, seeking a traditional publication contract. After nine months, I felt a bit stymied. At the UW-Madison Writers’ Institute in April 2019, I asked Laurie Scheer about this. She said, “How many agents have you queried so far?” I said, “Thirty or forty.” She guffawed. “Try three hundred!” she said. 

Discouraged? On the contrary, I found myself reassured. The problem was not necessarily with my book; only that the literary market is tough to crack. However, that very reassurance gave me the freedom to consider the niggling little thought that if the manuscript itself were a bit better, that would make it easier for agents to see its merit. Perhaps a hundred fifty queries would be enough to do the trick!

My other friend in the UW Writers’ program, Christine DeSmet, read my first ten pages—the most important part of any book for making a first impression—and gave me very useful feedback. Her comments showed me how I could make the first chapter not a little better—rather, a whole lot better. So I did. But Christine also recommended dissecting the whole book scene by scene, then improving each scene as needed. I blanched at the thought. I decided to do it anyway.

Toward a Smashing Second Draft

I spent the whole next month just reading my book. I analyzed 159 separate scenes; I wrote down the overall purpose of each scene, its setting, its characters, their goals, their conflicts, the resolution of those conflicts, and the particular moments of dramatic change. This yielded an analytical document 54 pages long.

So now, I revisit each scene to fix the problems that have shown themselves through this process of analysis. A huge task. Yet, not enough.

After I work my way through a chapter of scenes, I do the next step, suggested by another friend, Tracey Gemmell, author of More or Less Annie, and other members of my Tuesday evening writers’ group. In Microsoft Word, I search for every “ly” in the chapter (many of these turn out to be adverbs); for every “ing” (present progressives, present participles, gerunds); for every “and,” “or,” and “but” (conjunctions); for every “is,” “are,”  “was,” and “were” (verbs of being); for every “saw,” “heard,” “knew,” “felt,” “smelled,” and “tasted” (“filter” words). Then, I re-read the chapter in search of introductory time phrases or other introductory adverbial constructions. 

That step is a lot of work, too.

Not that there is anything wrong with adverbs, a progressive verbs, passive constructions, conjunctions, or introductory adverbial expressions. All those things have their places in effective prose. But they can become crutches that allow us to write gimpy narrative, when overused. By considering each occurrence in isolation, one often finds a more vivid and robust way—a less distanced, less stand-offish way—to say what one meant to say. If you change even a quarter of those expressions to more powerful constructions, it’s worth the effort. 

By the end of this process, I’ll have a book more worthy of readers’ time and attention. And, perhaps, a traditional publishing contract.

Stay tuned, dear readers.  

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)