Winding Up Revision or Are You Finished or Just Done?

      Wow.  There is nothing like batting clean up on a subject that my fellow TA's have covered so thoroughly. What better way to finish this series on revision than to answer the question "How do you know when you are finished with this manuscript?"
     Notice I didn't ask "How do I know if I am done with this story?" To me, finished and done are two different things. "Finished" is when you have taken the advice offered by my fellow TA's on revision.  When you have written the best possible story....wait two weeks and see if you still feel the same way. If so, it's time to send your baby out into the publishing world.
    "Done" is when you are so sick of writing this story (for the third or fifteenth or 115th time) that you want to pile all your characters into a car, and send them off a cliff, Thelma and Louise-style. ("And then they all died. The end.")  This is not sign that you are finished. ...it means you need a break.  Work on something else. When I am feeling "done" on a long project, I research another book (I am always researching the next book, while writing the current one), or mess around with a picture book I have on the back burner. (There's always a picture book on my back burners....several actually; it's a big stove!)
    Writing a book is sort of like building a house. (It's not exactly like building a house;  I never outline or make a blueprint.)  I know the style of house I want, how many rooms and the general floor plan. When I first began writing, I never revised. I figured the accomplishment of completing 300 pages deserved to be shared immediately with the writing world.
    Wrong, wrong, wrong!  You know that feeling of wanting to stick your hand in the mailbox to grab back your envelope (or wishing there were a "never mind" command on your computer to retrieve an email before it is delivered?) That's a hint that maybe your house isn't finished. OK, you know your house isn't finished. As soon as you can't unsend your work, you will realize the literary equivalent of a house with no back door. Or a second floor, but no stairs to reach it. You were so happy to be done (with a first, or maybe even a second or third draft) you didn't see those "tiny" flaws. When you are tempted to fire off your done manuscript, wait a week. Read it again. Does it still feel finished?                        
     Probably not. (How did you manage to not notice that you left a disconnected toilet in the kitchen? Or that you have three extra rooms that you don't remember why they are there?)
     On the other hand, sometimes you really are finished, but you are still twiddling around with your story. You are nitpicking over unimportant details that really don't matter.  Is it super super important that your character's best friend is named Megan or Morgan? (Sometimes it is important...but deep down you know if it is or not.) It's like changing the position of pictures on a wall. If it looks good over the fireplace and behind the couch...you are twiddling.  You are scared. You are afraid to let go.
      Let go.  If you really are down to switching minor details around, then changing them back,  you are finished.  Send it off.
     Then one of two things will happen. Rejection or acceptance.
     We all deal with it differently with rejection. I find that Ben & Jerry's current flavor is my coping mechanism (I didn't say it was a good one.) Hopefully, you all have in place a rejection plan that doesn't involve calories, money or something illegal.
     And then there is the acceptance letter/phone call/email. (Out of ten book sales, seven of them have been sent to me by email, three by phone and zero by snail mail.  You will get a formal printed letter after the emal/phone call.)  Jump up and down. Tell everyone you know. Celebrate.  Then wait.  Sooner or later your editor will send you a letter the size of War and Peace.  It's a revision letter.  There will be one.
      I promise.
Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Revising a Poem

Revision has been on my mind a lot lately. So has poetry. I'm teaching a course at Mount Mary College on writing poetry for children and young adults, and I'm also the guest speaker for the current Institute of Children's Literature Guest Speaker Workshop, "Poetry from the Poet's Side." I went to bed last night not knowing how I would address the topic for today's post. This morning, I decided to put some of my advice into a draft of a poem about the process of revising a poem.

*     *     *

Revising a Poem

First, the big picture:
Does it fit in a snapshot
or require a three-hour movie?
Focus.

Are the images clear?
Do they support the poem
like a tripod holds up a camera?

Look at language.
Does it whir where it should snap?

Alliteration sometimes strengthens
but sounds silly in an endless stream.

Onomatopoeia? Click! Does its job.

Listen.
Does the rhythm match the tone?

Make sure your rhyme
rhymes every time.

Do not repeat repeat repeat unnecessary words.

Try not to say
in a roundabout way
what one word or two
could do.

Use a line break for a
reason.

Does the poem show
what you want it to show?
Is it fully developed?
Does it show how you care?
Ask a reader you trust.

Then share.

*     *     *

I will consider my own advice as I revise this. I hope it helps you, too!

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Poem Farm. Enjoy!

JoAnn Early Macken

A Five-Star Revision Tip and Tool!

     R is for revision
           You see your draft anew.
       A second chance,
          to make tales dance.
               Lucky, lucky you!

Ironically, almost 2 years to the day the above poem appeared in my Sleeping Bear Press book S is for Story: A Writer’s Alphabet, I need to revise the second word in the third line so it reads….

                …another chance.

The revision process demands more than two passes to get the story, the telling and the language right.
In fact, way more.
The Good News is, as shared in the Robert Cormier quote that appears at the bottom of S is for Story’s R page,
“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

To celebrate IRA’s “Revision Week,” my fellow TeachingAuthors and I are offering up helpful insights, resources, tools and books gleaned from our at least 120 years total experience writing for children.

Here’s my offering, a five-star revision tip and tool if ever there was one:  before you’re ready to write your very last revised draft, write the book review you wish to receive, then keep it nearby to reread often, stuck or not. 

For the record, it helps to read reviews of similar, comparable books to the one you’re writing – in genre, in format, in subject matter, in time or setting, in style, before you write your own review.  It also helps to read several reviews of those similar, comparable books as expressed in different review journals.

If you’re writing for children, the most notable print review journals, available at your local library, online or by subscription, include the American Library Association’s Booklist, The Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and The Horn Book.  Each review journal has its own style, its own set of elements on which the reviewer focuses.

[FYI: reading all of the above journals helped me learn my craft – as well as - the stellar body of children’s literature and my Children’s Book World residents and players.]

No matter the journal in which the review appears,

• note the one-sentence description that summarizes the book for the reader – the what’s-it-all-about-anyway statement;
• study the brief outline of the plot, usually accomplished in 5 or so sentences that usually include the story’s major turning points;
• focus on the theme and its connection to the storyline;
• pay attention to critical comments concerning elements of narrative – i.e. characterization, voice, plot, etc., as well as the story’s craft and the writer’s talents;
• consider the selection of and reference to comparable, similar titles;
• read and reread the reviewer’s opinion as to the book’s value and its likely impact on readers.

What I love about this tool? 

Writing the one-sentence summary and multi-sentence synopsis requires my mastery of the story’s action.
The critical comments force me to assess how I crafted (1) the key elements of narrative and (2) my use of language.
Citing comparable books shows me how I want my book to distinguish itself from the others on the shelf.
Best of all?  Most of all?
Writing the review I wish my book to receive helps me remember why my book grabbed my heart in the first place, the reasons that kept me going no matter the revisions necessary, what I so want my book to do for my readers. 
I stay atop my story’s physical and emotional plotlines, but also tuned in to my own writer’s vested heart.

Though non-fiction, here’s the review I kept on my desk top while writing the last draft of S is for Story:

"Hershenhorn’s thoughtful and spirited telling of this abecedarian
journey through a Writer’s Life and Process is certain to inform, inspire and
ready young writers, not to mention once-young writers who remain
young-at-heart.  A joyous celebration of the all-important Reader-Writer
Connection, the rhymed verse for younger readers and the accompanying
side-bar narrative for older readers serve as mini-lessons to keep writers
writing.  Peeks inside a writer’s life, the inclusion of Writer’s Tips and the
appearance on each double-page spread of treasured authors’ meaningful
quotes multiply each lettered entry’s value and enjoyment.  Pullen’s 
singular, imaginative illustrations successfully offer a narrative all their own
while underscoring how lucky writers are to write.  Re-title this Writer’s
Alphabet “S is for Stellar.” 

I’m happy to share  the boxed Booklist review, written by Gillian Engberg – to prove the revision tool proved five-star indeed.

"Among sleeping Bear’s growing collection of themed abecedarian titles for middle-graders, this engaging, instructive introduction to writing stands out. The concepts paired with each letter cover elements of story (plot, characters); technique (revision, journaling); and basic practices for fostering creativity (observe). Short poems; clear, enthusiastic explanations; tips; and quotes from well-known children’s authors appear on each page, and a “P.S.” includes more interesting facts. The large color illustrations, featuring sometimes oddly proportioned figures, don’t shine as brightly as the warm, substantive text, which both teachers and students will return to repeatedly for reference and inspiration.” —Gillian Engberg, Booklist (Boxed review)

Looking for elements of a good book review? Try the folks at Scholastic (How to Write a Book Review by Rodman Philbrick).

Finally, Kathleen Horning’s revised and updated From Cover to Cover (HarperCollins) is considered the definitive guide to reading, reviewing and critically evaluating children’s books since its original publication in 1997.

Re-view. 
   Re-vision. 
      See your draft with new eyes.
Another chance to make tales dance.
      Lucky, lucky you!

Happy Revising!

Esther Hershenhorn

Note from Carmela, added 9/25/11: Esther's post is mentioned in the September YA Lit Carnival. You can see the carnival here.

Notes on Revision

My husband and I met, in a roundabout way, through our church choir.  He played guitar; I played flute. Then, in fairy tale fashion... we fell in love, got married, had kids... and suddenly one of us had to spend most of Mass in the vestibule with a screamer.  Choir became a fond memory, as have many other creative pursuits in these first exhausting years of parenting.

Yesterday we decided to join a community band.  My husband broke out his trumpet, we left the kids with his sainted sister, and off we went.  It was fun.  It was terrifying.  Because you know what?  When you make music... once you play a wrong note... it's out there, and everyone's heard it, and there's no way to take it back.  I played a lot of wrong notes yesterday.  I will practice.  It will get better.  (I hope.)

But I am reminded once again of the uniquely wonderful ability we have as writers to make something exactly as we want it BEFORE it goes out into the great, wide world.  How many times have we said or done something that we wish we had not, that we desperately wish we could take back?  When we write, that need  not EVER happen.  As someone with chronic foot-in-mouth disease, I believe this ability may be one of the very best gifts that the writing life has to offer.

It is therefore quite interesting to me that my writing students tend to be extremely resistant to the concept, let alone the practice, of revision.  I have been experimenting, in my disorganized way, for several semesters in ways to coax my students to take revision seriously.  Writing textbooks typically cover the following obvious points:
1) DEFINING revision is critical.  Our text compares the art of global revising to that of sentence-level editing.  (We write definition essays and comparison essays over the course of the semester, so we are also practicing useful skills here.)
2) Providing EXAMPLES of effective revision is also crucial.  Some writing texts do a fairly good job on this front, though actual student writing makes the best example. 

When all this is said and done, students theoretically have the tools to understand what's expected of them.  However, I typically find the effects to be negligible.

In kindergarten, my daughter learned to answer really insightful questions about the fiction she was reading:
Who are the characters?
What is the setting?
What is the main problem?
How is it solved?

I swear that if I could so simply boil down and answer all of these questions in my own writing, I would have it made!

This semester, in an attempt to make peer review more useful for my college students, I found a rubric that asked very specific questions, which I was able to tweak to suit the purposes of the assignment. What is this paper about?  What is the main point?  How is it organized?  What evidence is included that does not seem to serve the thesis statement?  Where could the author SHOW more and tell less?  Where is more evidence needed?

I also learned that many students equate a 'rough draft' with a scribbled-out version of their papers that, when typed nearly verbatim, magically becomes a 'final essay.'  In the past I have been wary of interfering with the all-important "process," but for the first time this semester, I required students to type their rough drafts.  If this means that two iterations must pass before a single draft is turned in, then fine.  All the better.

My official day job title is now "editor." My daughter looked over my shoulder recently and said, "The setnences start with capital letters and have periods at the end.  Everything looks good."  She's not so far off.  I have been through the grueling process of having a book edited, copy edited, re-edited -- and this after approximately 126 drafts before it ever reached the editor's hands.  On a soap opera, we typically finalize seven hour-long scripts per week.  I realize that I am asking my students to spend more time on individual papers than we are able to spend on scripts that are watched by 3 million viewers.  No wonder they resist! 

Nonetheless, tomorrow I will be seeing the fruits of my new peer review methodology.  I'll be back with an update.  And if anyone has a foolproof strategy for encouraging revision, please do share. -- Jeanne Marie

Revision! A LINGO poem! Poetry Friday! and a Play Doh exercise!

x

Howdy, Campers!  Happy Poetry Friday!

Poetry Friday is hosted by Secrets and Sharing Soda this week. (The direct link to the roundup is here.)

Thank you, Katie!

Our topic this week is REVISION, inspired by The International Reading Association (IRA)'s "Revision Week"--September 5-9, 2011.  Visit the IRA's Engage: Teacher to Teacher Blog this week to read/hear comments about revision from several well-known children's authors, including Cynthia Lord and Kate Messner.

We've written LOTS of posts on revision, because, of course, we're always revising.  ALWAYS.  Also, ALL WAYS.  

Oy.  Sometimes it feels as if an editor is asking me to kill my first born.  Ever feel that way to you?

This is me, off to revise:

Actually, sometimes revising is my favorite part.  I mean, at least I have the bones of the story or poem--now I just have to...have to...have DO something with those bones!

I thought I'd write a LINGO poem on editing and revising.  A Lingo is a brand new poetic form!  It's also fun to write.  See my last post.

The terms in bold are from this glossary of copyediting terms.  I chose the juiciest ones to play with and here's the result:

EDIT, CUT, KILL

by April Halprin Wayland

The guy was a legend.

He grew up rough, an orphan; 

he wore ragged right shoes,

cooked his meals on a boilerplate.

You shoulda seen his face.

I don't wanna justify nutin', but the dingbat had it coming.

When I finally found him in the gutter, 

it was a clean kill—he was dead copy.

They did it Chicago style, 

with a backslash, 

using a dagger.  

Or a bullet.  

Or maybe it was a flush and hang—hard to tell.

I tried to clean up the crime scene,

tried to redline it,

tried to flag someone down.

Finally I made an em dash for the door.

I don't have proof, mind you, 

but it looks like it coulda been 

a serial comma.

For today's WRITING WORKOUT, I'm reprising an exercise on revising which was at the end of a post that ran in August, when you were on vacation. 

You'll need:

• twice as many small cans of Play Doh as you have students
• plastic forks, knives and spoons
• writing materials

1) Let each student choose one can of their favorite color Play Doh...then scatter other cans on everyone's desk so they can share.  Make plastic forks, knives and spoons available, too.
2) Give them five minutes (or more) to make a person, animal or other creature.
3) If there's time, let everyone walk around the class to look at each creation.
4) Now tell each student to move to the next desk and make one radical change in the figure there.
5) Have them return to their desks and let the class walk around again, looking at the changes.
6) Discuss.  How did it feel when someone changed your art?  Do you like what it looks like now?  Which do you like better?

In one of the classes I teach through UCLA Extension Writers Program, most of my adult students are surprised that they like the changed creature best.  One woman admitted that she liked the changes...but also missed her own creation and felt slightly violated.

Yes...that's exactly how I feel when an editor or my critique group wants to edit (gasp!) my work.  Hurt, resentful, violated.  Sometimes, if I sit with the suggestions, I end up liking them.  I can see how it can take a village to create a vision bigger than my own.  Sometimes, though, I reject the changes.

If you'd like to make this more of a writing exercise, you can have your students write a story or poem during the process.  You might decide to have them write as soon as they've made their creature, before it is changed.  If you have time, you can also have them write after the changes--either about the changed creature or about how they feel now that it's different.

So--dive into Play Doh!  Let your room fill with its delicious perfume!

And remember to write with joy!

poem and drawings (c) 2011 April Halprin Wayland, all rights reserved

Revision Week, Random Acts of Publicity, and Blogosphere Buzz

The International Reading Association (IRA) has declared Sept. 5-9, 2011 to be "Revision Week." Visit the IRA's Engage: Teacher to Teacher Blog this week to read/hear comments about revision from several well-known children's authors, including Cynthia Lord and Kate Messner.

Classroom teachers often tell me that one of their greatest challenges is helping students understand that a first draft is only the first step in the writing process. And many adult writers also dread the "R" word: Revision. Yet, as Kate Messner says today on the Engage: Teacher to Teacher Blog: “Revision is where writing really happens.”
(In the audio interview, Messner also talks about making time to write while working full-time and raising a family.)

One of the best ways I've found to help writers of all ages appreciate the benefit (and necessity) of revision is a bit of "show and tell." I "show" the drafts of my novel Rosa, Sola with all the post-it notes from my editor and I "tell" about how that feedback helped me polish that story. You can see some photos of one of my drafts and read a bit about that process in this post from last year.

For both young students and adult writers, it's often difficult to look at our own work objectively. Below is a revised version of the Writing Workout I shared last year. (Yes, even blog posts and writing exercises get better with revision!) The Workout is intended as a way to help trick ourselves into reading our work as though it were written by someone else.     

Speaking of revision, the next session of my Craft & Critique Workshop, which is held in Oak Brook, IL, begins on Tuesday, Sept. 27. That class is ALL about revision. For more information, see my website. If you don't live in the Chicago area and are looking for some feedback on your writing, check out the Blogosphere Buzz below for help finding a critique partner.

In addition to Revision Week, this is the third annual Random Acts of Publicity week, a chance to celebrate and publicize the work of our fellow authors. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that THREE of the TeachingAuthors have new books out this year. If you're new to our blog, please read these posts to learn all about them: JoAnn Early Macken's Baby Says "Moo!", Mary Ann Rodman's Camp K-9, and Esther Hershenhorn's Little Illinois.
 

I'd also like to celebrate a wonderful new nonfiction book by my friend, April Pulley Sayre: Rah, Rah, Radishes! A Vegetable Chant. This book is a fun way to introduce children to the beauty and wonder of vegetables. (And maybe even get them to eat a few!) Click the photo below to learn more:
 

Blogosphere Buzz

• If you're looking to connect with a fellow writer to get feedback on your manuscript, check out agent Mary Kole's "Critique Connection" post on her Kidlit.com blog.
• There's a brand new Carnival of YA literature site, courtesy of Sally Apokedak. The TeachingAuthors have a link on the inaugural roundup, which you can read here.
• A member of my critique group sent me a link to an interesting blog post by an Australian writer on Whither the Children's Book? Some good food for thought.   

Writing Workout:
Revision=Re-seeing (Revised edition!)

To gain perspective on a manuscript, it helps to let it "cool off" by putting it away and not looking at if for awhile. After you or your students have completed what you believe is a polished draft of a piece of writing, try the following:

1. If the work is on a computer, print it out in a font you don't typically use. For example, if you usually print in Times New Roman, try an Arial or Verdana font, and maybe change the font size to slightly smaller or larger, too. If you're working with students who have written something by hand, have them type up and print out their work. If possible, print the draft on colored paper. I picked this suggestion up form Newbery-winning author Sharon Creech, who blogs about it here and includes photos of her drafts.)
2. Put the work aside for awhile, preferably, at least a month.  No matter how tempted you are, do NOT look at the manuscript at all during this time.
3. While the work is "cooling," keep reading and writing. Read the kinds of things you like to write and/or books about the craft of writing. At the same time, start a new writing project, brainstorm future writing topics, or write daily in a journal, even if for only a minute. (See April's post about this.) This step is VERY important--you want to continue your growth as a writer while your story cools.
4. At the end of the month, pull out your "cooled" draft. When you read it, pretend it was written by someone else. What do you like about the piece? What don't you like about it? What would make it better?

Happy writing (and revising)!
Carmela