Tag Archives: revising a short story

2021 Review & Planning for the New Year

The Snow is Watching by Maria L. Berg 2021

A Review of Experience Writing 2021

This fall has been intense: jumping out of bed every day to explore new photography ideas and write a poem. I know exactly what I’ve been doing since October first, but what was I up to last January?

I’m glad I took a look because I don’t want this year to be an exact copy of last year, but I have the same revision goals. I made a lot of progress, but not as much as I would like. So this year, to switch things up, just a little bit, the focus will be on Novel Revision Motivation.

Last January, I didn’t post much, but I did discover TBR Con (To Be Read Convention) a free online writers convention that I enjoyed. I looked it up and the TBR Con 2022 schedule is up. Shelly Campbell, who was kind enough to do an interview about her revision process last February, will be part of the Worldbuilding 101 panel on Monday January 24th at 2pm PST.

In February, I also had a guest post by author Ferrel Hornsby with her revision tips.

In March, I took Cat Rambo’s online revision class and started a series of posts demonstrating my work revising a short story:

  1. Revising a Short Story: working through discouragement
  2. Revising a Short Story: Pacing and Structure
  3. Revising at the Scene Level
  4. Revising a Short Story: the penultimate pass
  5. Revision: Using Feedback to Strategize

I also discovered Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) which I enjoy participating in each week. Having one day a week that is completely stream of consciousness is an idea I enjoy. Glad I checked over there today. Looks like Linda has a daily blogging challenge for January called Just Jot It January, in case you’re looking for a daily blogging challenge for the new year.

April brought National Poetry Writing Month, in which I wrote 30 poems in 30 days and the A to Z blogging challenge. This year I chose janus words which are very interesting words that mean one thing and its opposite.

In May I did an intensive demonstration of creating a poetry revision process and revising a poem. There are eight parts and it starts with Revising Poetry: Creating a process.

The final post in that series came out in June and then I took July off. In August I had some fun photographing and drawing flowers and I discovered the Changing Focus Challenge and made my first multi-media video with bokeh, music, and poetry. My piece is called Pathways.

In September Experience Writing had a guest post from author, poet, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic, Jacob M. Appel called Vision and Revision. I attempted to do another multi-media video for the theme Reflections, but it didn’t come together.

October was October Poetry Writing Month OctPoWriMo, and Writober (flash fiction) and I found Tourmaline.’s Halloween Challenge which got me started with daily photography prompts.

In November, I made up my own daily photography prompts and continued daily photos and poetry, participating in Writer’s Digest’s November Poem a Day Challenge. I also won National Novel Writing Month attempting a rewrite of the novel I started in 2019. I wrote 50,000 words but the draft is far from complete. Guess what I’ll be working on in 2022.

And this month I made another daily photo prompt calendar, continued to write a poem every day, and made a multi-media project for the Changing Focus Challenge prompt Rest, Sleep and Hibernation.

That was a busy year. Looking back, I did a pretty good job of sticking with my revision theme. Though I did not complete as many revisions as I would have liked, I explored my process and have a better understanding of the steps I need to take to succeed. So here’s to a year of motivated revision!

If Snow Could Talk by Maria L. Berg 2021

New Poem

New Year’s Resolution

And the cycle continues
but something has to change
the barefoot and bicycles
will arrive too soon
coming or going
they will circle
and what will I have finished
what sweet delight
prepared to serve
the gibberish and frothing
fills pressed pulp
like teeth in a shark’s
wicked grin and yet
I continue to chum
the dark waters
and the dollars and itches circle
coming and going
when will the attention rapt
be enough to keep me in my seat
carving to the revealed
that is supposed to be inside
but I find never finished
and we cycle again
the spokes bent
the tire always needing air
the road uphill both ways
the music and stars
will arrive too soon
and any interest in taming the gibberish
will float on the froth
and effervesce

Snowflakes by Maria L. Berg 2021
The Ball Drops by Maria L. Berg 2021

The New Year

Tomorrow all day The Poetry Project is having its 48th annual poetry marathon. Hundreds of poets will be reading their poems. What a great way to enjoy the first day of the new year.

I signed up for Sarah Selecky’s Six Weeks, Six Senses writing program to jump start some short stories this year. I get my first prompts tomorrow.

I was planning on taking a little time off, maybe switching to once a week for a while, but today, the final day of 2021, I will have posted new photos and poems every day for 92 days straight. It feels silly to stop 8 days short of 100, so I’ll keep it up through the first week of January.

Instead of creating a new photography prompt calendar, I will use Of Maria Antonia’s 2022 Weekly Photo Challenge Bingo Card:

So come back tomorrow and join me for some photography and poetry for the new year, and maybe I’ll have some ideas of how we can stay motivated to revise our work.

Rushing In by Maria L. Berg 2021

Happy Reading and Writing!

Revising a short story: the penultimate pass

Now that I have revised at the story level and the scene level, it is time to dig into those paragraphs, sentences and words. A fun and useful tool to use at this point is the word cloud. I put my text into Word It Out and created this:

The program has some great tools. After pasting the text into the text box, I clicked on Settings at the bottom right and added the character names at the end of the filter words. Then, once I created my word cloud, I clicked on Wordlist and can click on any of the words to see how many times I used them. I definitely want to look at the instances of “like” and “back” and explore why I used them so much.

After working on some of the issues that my word cloud revealed, I continued using the “Find” function. I found some lists of words to looks for in some of my old posts. Revision: Overused Words helped me find some problems with “very” and “really.” And Part Two The Worrying Wave of Weak Verbs: a cautionary tale of the murderous search for to be, to have, to do, to get, to go and to make got me on the right path to finding all my weak verbs. A search for “ly” also helped me strengthen my verbs by revealing the adverbs I used to modify them. My “ly” search also showed that I overused “only” which in most cases, I deleted.

This time, when I listened to the computer read my story, it was helpful. I noticed a couple typos, some words and phrases that were clunky, and a couple unnecessary sentences. It helped me fix the timing of the ending so it had the punch I wanted. And the most exciting part? I liked it.

I will print it out and read it aloud a few times, and then send it to a few beta-readers for feedback.

Revising at the Scene Level

Fixing It – photograph by Maria L. Berg 2021

In my last post on revising a short story, I mentioned the many things a scene needs to do:

  • have a goal
  • have a conflict
  • have an action that leads to a new goal
  • character development
  • world building
  • reveal new information
  • provide sensory information
  • have a grabber or payoff

For my revision, I assigned each of these scene needs a letter, and starting with the final scene, worked backward through my story, evaluating each scene. Here’s an example:

Scene 14: Maria’s POV after feeding in the town [one of my MCs is a Mexican-American named Maria (not me 😉 )].

G – To leave town
C – a farmer tries to help her, grabs her wrist
A – She uses aspects of the chupacabra to get away
D – She feels / wields the chupacabra’s power, misses old life
W – describes the nearest town to the river
N – Maria can bring out the chupacabra for defense when scared
S – sounds: door slams, whistling; texture: grimy
P – She hurt the farmer to get away

This quick analysis of each scene did wonders. I completely deleted one scene and combined two others. I discovered areas that needed more description and sensory detail and a section of exposition that I was able to show in a scene. I had printed out a more detailed “Deconstructing a Scene” worksheet I created a couple years ago, but I didn’t use it because this system worked. I plan to use it as part of my revision process in the future.

After analyzing each scene, I typed in all my changes, saved the draft and let it rest.

But the Distractions – photograph by Maria L. Berg 2021

I found joy in editing a different, shorter story while letting this one rest. In that story, the main issues were filter words. It really helped the piece to remove sensory filters: saw, heard, and felt. I also added specific details like “mahogany” instead of wood. By the time I finished revising the story, I enjoyed reading it aloud. The words felt good in my mouth.

Doin’ the Work – photograph by Maria L. Berg 2021

I brought the feeling of accomplishment and the specific issues I found in the shorter story to the next phase of revision: paragraphs, sentences, and word choice which I will talk about in my next post.

How is your revision is going? Have any tips or tricks?

Any questions?

Please share in the comments.

Revising a short story: working through discouragement

Levi says, “Walk away. Don’t force it. Give it some time.”

Because I’m focusing on revision this year, I want to bring you along as I attempt to revise my work and improve my revision process. Hopefully, we can all improve together.

I found a call for submissions that I think one of my stories will fit perfectly, so I’m starting with it. For once, I have plenty of time; the deadline isn’t until May. This is one of my longer short stories and I worked on it for a long time. I have edited and submitted it in the past, but after rejections set it aside. Now, with this anthology call as a goal, I thought it would be a great piece to put through Cat Rambo’s revision class and use as an example for my own revision process.

  • First, I printed it out (double spaced, Times New Roman, double sided pages to not waste paper).
  • Then I read it aloud, trying not to stop for notes, but making some notes.
  • Then I stopped. I hated it. It wasn’t the great story I remembered. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be.
  • I came back and finished reading it aloud, but had to walk away.
  • I was disappointed and had no intention of figuring out how to fix it.
  • I searched the internet for what to do when you hate your story.

You Hate Your Writing? That’s a good sign from Jane Friedman at Writer Unboxed led me to Ira Glass on Storytelling

and Why You Don’t Need To Worry Hating Your Own Work by Robert Wood at Standout Books also talks about Ira Glass’s videos.

Why It’s Okay to Hate Your Writing by Sarah Gribble at The Write Practice

It helped to know that most writers go through this. And happily, I think I’m getting to the other side of the I hate everything phase. What was the magic fix? As usual, there wasn’t one. The answer was time and work. I kept going back to Cat Rambo’s class and trying to get myself to do each revision pass on my story. Finally something clicked, and since then things have kept clicking. Here’s what has worked so far:

My Short Story Revision

1.Major cuts: The first thing that had to change is I went into a flashback way too soon. Though the backstory in that flashback is important to the story, I plan to only use the most important parts and pepper them in later, so for now, I cut the flashback completely.

2. The Character and Dialogue focus: After cutting the flashback, it became clear that one of my two characters was less developed and it was the character I introduced first. To fix this, I journaled about his life before the story, his wants and needs and rather quickly got to know him and his story arc. Then I went through the story and found places where I could add character development.

My characters are opposites in every way, so I want each character to have a distinct voice. I journaled for a while about what would influence their style and word choice, exploring such things as education, socialization, family life, etc. I also decided that both of my characters needed new names, so I did a little research.

3. Setting focus: While exploring my character, I decided that he has a biology degree and works in a Garden center. He would have knowledge of the local flora that would impact the story. This made the specific setting more important. In the first draft, the setting could have been any river in any forest in North America, but after doing some research, I have now set my story in Northwestern California and have specific plants and trees for my characters to interact with.

At this point my draft is so marked up, I can’t read it. I’m going to sit down with all my notes and write a brand new draft from scratch. Hopefully my next read through won’t lead to me saying, “I hate this,” but something closer to, “this has potential.”