Author Joyce Carol Oates says, “The pleasure is the rewriting.” Author John Irving says, “More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.”

I enjoy revising and deepening my writing and want to help you increase the pleasure you take in making revisions as well as help you increase your stamina for doing them. Try applying some of the following ideas to work  you have created and see what happens.

1. Take what you have written and tighten it by taking out words and phrases that repeat information the reader already has from earlier images or scenes.
2. Take what you have written and look for intangible, summarizing words like “beautiful,” “sad,” or “wonderful” and “fantastic.”  Find a way for well-chosen details might offer evoke those feelings and ideas in the reader directly.
3. Take what you have written and ask if your work has a beginning, middle and end. Then ask if the end ties up or returns to something the beginning opened? Rewrite until your ending satisfies.
4. Ask the speaker in the work or the narrator, “Why are you writing this now?”  An answer might be, “Because I caught myself in the act of doing something my mother had done in raising me, and I wanted to explore how her actions affected me so I might choose a different way of behaving as a parent.” When you have an answer, make sure your written piece is arranged so the reader knows its occasion and gets into it easily.
5. Check your title. Does it set the reader up but not give away the point? Is it catchy and specific?
6. Ask the main character or speaker, “Are we talking about a time when everything was about to change?” If the answer is no or unclear, rethink the moment of the story’s opening or climax.
7. Is the diction of your writing working for the emotional occasion you are depicting? Do things sound as natural as they should? If words hit your ear with the wrong sound, look at your word and phrase choices and make the changes that will allow your writing to sound natural for the speaker and characters.
8. Have you told about rather than given examples? Fill in examples to replace summary.
9. Have you created a clear organization on the page that helps readers follow your story or poem or essay from one paragraph, stanza or chapter to the next without slowing the momentum? Make sure the reader can make all leaps from part to part with ease. Use words that depict time passing or a change in location or view or better, jump into scenes in a way that the reader knows the characters or speaker have moved in time or location. For instance, one scene might be at the kitchen table and the next on a busy street. The “jump” from table to street could be in an image like this one: “My coat couldn’t keep the chill out as I walked to work.”
10. Have you kept exposition (the explaining of things you think the reader needs to know to understand the occasion ) to a minimum? Is there any left that takes the reader out of the moment and reality of the experience on the page? Delete it and you may find that the images and action told the reader in brighter language what you were explaining but if you feel something more is needed, replace your exposition with details through the speaker or characters’ senses.
11.  Count your characters–are there too many? Fold some of them together into one or take out references and scenes about ones that don’t play a big part in the story.
12. Count your scenes. Are there too many? Can you accomplish the same thing in fewer expanded scenes? Write the story with fewer but expanded scenes.
13.  Is it clear who wants what and why they are having trouble getting it? Where this is unclear, heighten the anxiety, disappointment or the frustration a character or speaker experiences.
14.  Does the setting seem real? Go back (do research if necessary) and fill in details that will make the setting authentic, even if it is a science fiction or fantasy work. Whenever we read, we need to be able to continue in what is called the “fictional dream.” That goes for memoir, too, as we have to believe we are in that story.
15.  Is humor, if you have used it, helping or hindering? Are jokes and perceptions well placed to further the readers’ understanding of the situation and speaker or characters or is the humor distracting and self-conscious diluting the strength of the writing? Comb through your writing and decide if the humor works or needs to come out or be further developed.
16. If the point of view in your work consistent? If you sense that it drifts, work on staying in the point of view you have established.
17. Are your tenses consistent–remaining in the present or the past as necessary? Why does the work move from present to past and past to present? Is this always clear?
18.  Look for metaphors in your writing. Are they well chosen? Are they in keeping with the emotional landscape you are depicting? Are there so many that the writing seems artificial?  Add or delete as necessary.
19. If you have a hunch that you repeatedly lean on certain words, do a word search and see how often the word comes up. See if you can substitute other words in some places so your writing is richer. Sometimes the reflexive use of the same word again and again is like a writer’s place holder—there could be whole sentences and paragraphs to write in those places and that will deepen your writing.
20.  If you think your writing needs more work, change the order of the scenes or stanzas, make what you thought was the ending or climax the beginning. Then what happens?
21. If you think your writing needs more work, change the point of view to that a different character or to that of something inanimate or non-human.  See what you learn. Do things become more vivid, more important?
22. Try changing the tense of a poem or story if things seem stagnant.
23. Find the moment in the writing you’ve done so far that most excites you and begin again writing from there.

And a bonus while revising:  Just because you’ve written in one genre doesn’t mean you can’t use the material in another genre. Some of these ways of looking into your work will free you up to do that. And just because you’ve written something one way at one word length doesn’t mean you won’t get mileage out of writing to a different word length. These days writing flash stories of 50, 69, 100, 150, 250, 500, 750 or a 1000 words is fashionable and publishable and often you’ll find flash pieces inside what you have written when you are looking to revise.