Parisian Love Lock. “People place their love locks all over the pont des arts pedestrian bridge which crosses the seine. Because they think they’re in love. Silly kids.” –thezartorialist.com, flickr
The closest thing I’ve got to a love story is my novel about Sarah Wade.
I didn’t set out to write a love story, and so much of the time it isn’t one. It’s not really about a relationship with The One, for Sarah or any of the young men in her life (in spite of what a few readers of my early drafts have seen). But because the story traces Sarah through her adolescence, she encounters a broad spectrum of awkward crushes, unwanted affections, and unrequited love which help her define herself. She seems an appropriate character for a Valentine’s Day blog post.
Of all my characters, I share the most history with Sarah. She works through art, church, and sex with some of the same beginnings as I did, but ends up in a very different place, one that contradicts my own experience in many ways. I believe it’s our similar beginnings that have made her story so hard to revise all these years. I think I am not alone in this: when we write a character too close to ourselves, we are in danger of wanting to protect them from all that the novel must bring. I know I pushed her in a direction she wasn’t necessarily supposed to go for my own gratification. One result of that push is that I learned some things about her that I would not have if I’d let her go the way she wanted. Still, the truth remains. She is the character, not I, and until she goes the way she wants to, instead of the way I want her to, her story will be wrong, off, unbalanced.
Sarah is the reason I began grad school. I hoped I would learn some strategies for revising a novel. As it turns out, my hopes were a little unrealistic. In the scope of a four-month class where each student needs equal workshop time, the most I can expect to revise is a couple chapters here and there. A a full-scale revision for something the size of a novel just isn’t addressed. So I am using this blog to try to work it out instead.
Today I’m sitting down with Sarah to try again to untangle her web and restitch it in the right places. I think I am getting closer. Here’s what I’m doing:
*About a month ago, after a long time away from the current draft, I sat down and wrote out the themes most important to Sarah’s story. I then went through the novel page by page and made notes for which characters, scenes, and chapters spoke to those themes and which ones did not. I made a chapter-by-chapter Keep/Kill list of what will stay and what will go for every chapter.
*Today I am creating binders for the pages that have writing I plan to keep and/or rework. I am using my notes from a month ago, reevaluating them as I go. I am not throwing away any of the kill pages, just storing them in a separate binder. Physically separating the keep from the kill will show me (I hope) where the gaps are and also help me to get a better idea for how to rework the keep pages.
*After separating the keep from the kill, I will write out a story inventory listing each scene that remains so I can get a quick overview of the entire project. Chances are good that Post-it notes will play a big role in this process so that I can move events around and fill in gaps with notes for new writing.
I have some ideas of where I will go from here, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. This is the first time I have tried this approach, and it may change as I go. If you are writing a longer work, or have written a longer work, I would love to hear any revision strategies you have used. If you are as lost as I have been, I hope that some of my ideas help you develop strategies of your own. So there’s the real love story: as writers, we’ve got to have each other’s backs. Happy Valentine’s Day.
