a revision prompt: applying layers
learning to love romance, tolerating the awkward, yicky stages of drafting so you can bloom
I’m not sure you’re supposed to really like daylilies—they’re a bit garish, they grow on the roadside, etc—but I do.
Similarly, I thought for a long time that real writers didn’t read romance. It was all Fabio covers and heaving bosoms, right? What could there be for me to learn there?
Well, as in so many things in my life, I was wrong.
I started with Jasmine Guillory after reading her contribution to Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer in 2019:
There are a lot of things that go along with writing for me: anxiety; stress; uncertainty; confusion. There’s also hope and joy and wonder and celebration, too, but the other things can sometimes drown the good parts out. But I’ve realized there’s so much of this writing life I can’t control – if people like my book, if people review my book well (or at all), if people buy my book, if people understand my book, the list goes on. But the one thing I can control is the work. I can make myself sit down and do the work, 1000 words at a time. And I’ve realized my goal in doing this work is to write a book that I love, and one that I’m proud of, and I control that, too.
Guillory’s books follow the romantic lives of a group of friends and family in California, a strategy for a series I love because you get to see characters from new angles through the books. They also always feature women being really good at their jobs, something I think there should be more of in fiction. Talia Hibbert’s Brown sisters series is also great.
Aside from being fun reads, though, romance has taught me a lot about plot structure and developing tension. When the book follows, more or less, a formula dictated by the genre, you can really see the writer’s creativity in flexing and adapting that structure as they write.
And recently, I found this little gem of an author essay in the back of Sally Thorne’s Second First Impressions, another great romance that features endangered turtles and the sassy older ladies of a retirement home. (Her very fun first book, The Hating Game, is being made into a movie.) In her author essay, Thorne describes the drafting and revision process in a way I find really helpful:
I’ve come to a realization that becoming good at something creative or worthwhile is a process of applying layers, and being willing to be really uncomfortable when the Thing is halfway done. It will look yicky. You will not like it. You will be pretty sure that you’re not succeeding. This is when another layer must be applied.
I love this essay for two reasons: it’s a reminder that any good thing, any piece of writing or art that moves you or excites you or makes you despair that you’ll never do anything quite so good had to go through a stage of being awkward and even ugly. It’s so easy to compare our drafts to someone else’s finished product and forget that whatever beautiful thing you’re reading required a lot of work to get there. And so much of the work of writing is just a kind of stubbornness: working through the discomfort and distress of a thing that isn’t as good as you want it to be.
And second, it offers a practical way through. You don’t have to throw out the whole piece, you don’t have to fix it all at once. You just add a layer. And then you layer some more.
(You can read the whole author essay here, with huge apologies for the terrible quality of the doc; my scanner is acting up, so these are the very best pictures I could take wiht my phone.)
Today I’ll share a revision exercise based on that idea of layering.
Revision as Layering: An Exercise
Select a draft to work on. This should be something that currently feels, as Thorne says, yicky, something that isn’t living up to your hopes for it.
Re-read it and highlight moments that interest you, or that feel like they’re getting close to what you wanted to express. (Even the yickiest draft has little sparks in it like this! If you’re having trouble finding them, imagine this it’s a draft a friend shared. It’s so often easier to be kind to other’s writing than our own - and kindness can help you move forward more effectively than despair and a red pen.)
What additional layers can help amplify those sparks in the draft? A layer could be any of the following:
more or additional sensory details
detail or description about place or physical appearance
proper nouns (e.g. instead of “bird” or “tree” figure out what specific kind of creature you’re writing about; because my knowledge of flora and fauna is terrible, I typically google my region and a description of the thing, then use image search to narrow it down)
precise verbs (try swapping forms of to be for action, if you can; look at your action verbs and see if any of them can do more work or be more surprising)
braid in a whole new layer. This is the most dramatic form of layering. Identify a topic or idea in the draft and research it further. Say you started out writing about your dad building birdhouses with your kids but the draft was feeling kind of flat and blah. So you add in the kind of bird - a wren - the birdhouse is designed for, and then you go down a whole new road into learning about wrens and their habitats and nesting patterns, and perhaps that opens up new avenues for the piece.
Pick one or more of the layers above and work through your draft in stages. Read first just for sensory detail, for example, and see what you can add in. Then maybe take a look at your verbs and work on those. It might still be ugly or awkward! You might feel uncomfortable as you work. That’s okay. It just means you need to keep going.
notes and reading suggestions:
I just wrapped up a nonfiction workshop I was teaching for Murphy Writing’s Midsummer Online Getaway, and we read Tessa Fontaine’s great short essay, The Blind Prophets of Easter Island. I love it, and I think you should read it. I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it ends with a shark, if that entices you to click through.
Poets & Writers has a great Craft Capsule series, and I particularly loved Anjali Enjeti’s The “Routine” of Writing With Chronic Pain. I loved what she said to say about how writing and living with chronic pain has helped her challenge ideas about productivity and extend kindness to herself:
What I have also built into this “schedule” (if it can be called that) is grace and forgiveness. My body has earned rest and restoration. My mind deserves the space to process the trauma and grief that comes from a life in constant pain. As a writer in pain, I can’t afford to yield an inch to guilt or regret for not writing.
Perhaps, while writing in pain, I have learned a valuable lesson that I never would have learned otherwise. I’m still a writer, even if I spend entire days lying on a heap of ice packs instead of chipping away at a manuscript. I’m a writer no matter how many or how few words actually make it to the page.
I wrote last week about counting and measuring and making progress toward goals - but I think it’s also valuable to be reminded about the importance of extending grace and forgiveness to ourselves when we’re not able to work at the speed or consistency we’d hoped for.
What layers have you tried adding to your work? What tricks or strategies help you with revision? I’d love to hear how your writing is going, and particularly if you’re interested in more writing and/or revision prompts. (I’d also love your romance recommendations!) You can always reply to this email, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).