Over the past year, I’ve been delving deep in to the craft of revision and how I personally go about it. And strangely, this is the biggest tool I’ve been using, and it came straight from my brain. This technique will help you organize your characters, your worldbuilding, your plot, everything, because, let’s face it: essays are useful, no matter how many you bullshitted in high school and college.
Think of these as more like the essays given out as creative nonfiction assignments where you write on a certain subject straight from your mind but everything you write is true and from your personal experience. When you’re in revision, you are tearing into your characters’ minds and finding out what makes them tick; you’re tearing into your plot to find out what is necessary, unnecessary, and what needs rearranging; you’re tearing into everything in your first draft, flipping it around, chopping it up.
These essays are to help you make sense of all those chopped up pieces. When you read your first draft, the whole piece is going to need work. Don’t deny it. You need to build up a lifetime behind your characters and a history behind your world and plot. For this piece, I’m focusing on characters, because characters are the backbone of your story. But how do you manage to make these bare facts become motivations and emotions and character depth? Write an essay. No, really, I’m not joking. Say your protagonist has a pathological fear of flying. Start writing about it by answering questions that naturally follow the fear and analyzing the answers.
When did they realize they feared flying? How did they react? How old were they? How were they flying? How did others react to their flying? Answer the questions, but make the words flow. You don’t need to be making multiple drafts of these essays. Don’t worry about writing too much or too little. Just write about your character without the restraints that prose and plot naturally puts on them.
Eventually, you might see that your character doesn’t actually fear flying. They fear falling: the greater the height, the worse the fall. From here, you can choose to extrapolate to the fear of falling as the fear of failing: of literally being unable to hold oneself up when everyone else seems to be doing just fine.
See? Now the freak-out they had when they were twelve in the plane reveals a crucial facet of their character: they’re a perfectionist, they’re anxious, they fear the mockery of others.
Now, you have a character with very deep emotions and motivations, and all from the simple fear of flying across the country. Now you can build on these deep fears to make a very well-rounded character.
Your revision is going to be all about the extrapolation, at least in the first stages. You can’t just say they did this because that’s just the way they are; you have to present your characters as products of their history and their world. Your essay will both organize facts in an organic fashion and be a crucial referral point when you start composing the prose for the second draft.
Not all of your revision can be in-story. In fact, most of what you write in revision—in all writing—isn’t going to make it into the final draft.
Now go write some essays, see if they work for you or not, and I’ll see you all next week for my take on creating unique protagonists.
