I took this picture on a Saturday after my birthday, when Chad agreed to take the girls hiking because I needed to revise, and he was going away the following weekend, leaving me with the kids.
In the quiet, I printed out my novel and spread out on the floor, notes beside me, sticky notes to mark where I needed to add or move something around, highlighters and multi-colored pens ready to mark for character development, plot twists, backstory, symbolism. I sat on the floor and began to read, taking notes on each chapter’s purpose, tracking the movement of time, searching for inconsistencies.
This is what a few pages looked like when I was done.
And during that time, I got to thinking how much space revising a story requires. While a draft can exist in the cloud, on that ethereal space—perhaps spread over multiple documents, one labeled “draft” and another “notes”—revisions, at least for me, must take up actual space. An entire floor of space.
There, I analyze the structure of my entire novel, tracking where I dropped hints of the big reveal, where I failed to connect the dots, when I introduced a new character, and how many words I’ve devoted to one subplot, character, or feeling over another, all to see in one picture what I otherwise must hold in my head, so I can make sure it all threads together by the end.
But I must have quiet space, too, with room to think, uninterrupted, no children begging for snacks, no appliances beeping because they’re full and finished, not even a husband walking through my office on his way to the garage, when I must pause the thought I had almost completed but lost instead.
So physical house space + quiet, interrupted space + time = global revisions.
I can’t help but think of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf argues this very point: a writer must have her own, quiet space, away from her daily obligations, which we now call her mental or invisible workload. We like to think of that space as mostly virtual, the space inside one’s head—clear thoughts, unencumbered creativity, the freedom to speak our minds—or in the cloud, from where we can access our documents, neatly stored and out of our children’s reach.
But, what of that physical space? How do writers find that when revising? We take take over the dining-room table or family-room floor. We gate off a hallway and tell the dog not to tromp on our papers. We build she-sheds and offices with doors—no locks—with yards upon yards of empty floor on which we crouch and organize our stories.
This week, during a Curtis Brown thriller course I’m taking, author Erin Kelly tasked us with listing every question raised in our books and how those are answered. We were to draw arcs from one to the other. If all the arcs went from beginning to end without anything connecting to the middle, we had saggy middle syndrome. If some questions had no answer to arc to, we had plot holes.
This is how much space that exercise took for my current novel (my feet in there for reference).
Here’s what it looks like close up.
The exercise was a breakthrough for me, not just for this particular novel, but for my process. I found an easy way to transfer the entire plot’s organization from my head to the visual page, making the entirety of story available in one scroll-like view with graph-like markings and visual cues. I saw right away what I must revise, what worked, and how many times I repeated a question, the plot not moving forward but rather looping in a saggy fashion.
And, as an added bonus, I could hang this up on my office wall, taking no floor -or-table space.
I still haven’t figured out how to to keep my children from drawing on it, because they want to be thriller writers, too. (That’s another post for another day.)
Love this like crazy. What a beautiful, messy process it is to create. I love seeing the artifacts of thinking, imagining and reconstructing. What a gift to let us behind your curtain.
This is so cool. I love seeing inside a writer’s process and I so admire your bravery in slashing chunks of text (in the first photo). The question-answering exercise sounds most excellent. At this point, my novel has very few questions and I wonder if I need to start asking more of it. In any case, I’m inspired to dust off the printer.