Take Your Writing From Good to Great
Five ways to re-vision your work
Wouldn’t it be nice if writing a perfect post were as easy as opening up that fresh New Story page, tapping at the keyboard for a few minutes, and then hitting publish? (Cue claps, highlights, and adoring responses.) But we all know that’s not true. The more experienced a writer is, the more revision tricks they have up their sleeves. Here are a handful of great, unexpected revision tips:
See your writing with fresh eyes
As culture writer Clive Thompson writes, “rewriting requires me to do something that’s cognitively and emotionally tricky: I have to regard my writing with fresh eyes. I need to be a little bloodless, and see it from an alien perspective.” He has an odd trick for doing this. Thompson actually switches to an old computer to review drafts, so that the pieces really look and feel like someone else wrote them. (A lower-lift version could be changing the font, or printing a piece out and reading it on paper.)
Make a beat sheet
Here’s a trick stolen from screenwriters: Novelist and writing coach Courtney Maum suggests breaking down each of your paragraphs into “beats.” Basically this involves writing out what each sentence is doing to advance the piece forward. It works equally well for short pieces and book-length works.
Write the piece shorter. And write the piece longer.
What happens to your piece if you cut away everything unnecessary, and wrote the 100-word version? What about if you expanded it into a 3000-word version? Casey Lawrence uses this exercise here for a work of fiction, but we think it would work just as well for any piece of prose.
Start a writing group
In her advice column for Human Parts, author Eileen Pollack writes about the value of writing groups. This can be in person or virtual, and they can be other writers in your field or genre, or a diverse group of creative types. Having people critique your drafts can be intimidating, but there’s no substitute for getting first readers’ advice about what you should edit or revise. As Pollack puts it: “After a period of resistance — I usually feel sick to my stomach for at least a few hours after anyone critiques my work — you should find yourself eager to revise your draft to make it stronger.”
Go through the self-editing checklist
Here it is. Just trust us on this one:
Got a great revision strategy? Let us know in the responses.
