Revising

Perseverance: Writing, revising over 30 years leads to published essay

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: The beach at Oceanside, Calif., from “Views Along the Coast Route between Los Angeles and San Diego.”

Good News: The Spectacle publishes “Scorpion Diary”

My personal essay “Scorpion Diary” has been published by The Spectacle, a literary magazine based at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Scorpion Diary” started as an outline of a boxing-type battle scribbled on napkins at a pizza-by-the-slice shop in 1992. The first drafts focused on the woman versus nature conflict, along the lines of, “Whoa, I lived with scorpions.”

Based on paid feedback from a Tahoma Review editor, revisions incorporated more “woman versus nurture” elements, namely the lasting effects of my mother’s alcoholism. Although I had been researching and drafting pieces about women alcoholics for years, Mom had a rock-wall silent treatment. I knew she wouldn’t understand my need to examine our lives in writing, let alone publish what I’d written. After she died, I restarted my work on this and several related projects.

NOTE: Tahoma Review, Craft, and other literary magazines offer paid feedback and critique options. Prices start at a few extra dollars for the “feedback option” on your submission, which yields a paragraph from a magazine editor. Projects that could benefit from in-depth critiques may cost $50 or more (much, much more). As always, select reputable organizations and editors who work with your type of writing. Beware of editors offering promises of greatness if only you’d send them more money.

Given the years I spent in stealth research mode, especially regarding women alcoholics, my source list for “Scorpion Diary” was long. Present-day websites, such as the “Alcohol Self-Assessment Test” from the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, continue to prove helpful given the effects of substance abuse on families and children. My oldest source was a doctoral dissertation on Arizona scorpions from 1939.  

The college-instructor frame for “Scorpion Diary” came from chats with two students during a memorable pre-pandemic semester. One student felt she had to choose between supporting her alcoholic mother or pursuing her own goals to get an education and career. Another student was in crisis about how to get through the semester while keeping his family housed. I recognized the parental roles both students took on, complete with the burdens of guilt and Sisyphean responsibilities.

A major revision took “Scorpion Diary” (as well as “Handwashing Dishes,” which was published by Southeast Review) into second-person (you) point of view. Second-person POV helped me navigate glitchy passages that wanted to shift between first-person insights and third-person reportage. Second person offered a balance between emotional distance and experiential immediacy that conveyed more than I ever thought I could back when I was writing on those pizza-place napkins.

Readings that inspired my work in second person continue to include, Cherry, a memoir by Mary Karr, as well as chapters from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction that focus on writing in second-person.

Bookshelf: Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open offers a plethora of writing prompts

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: Eagle River and Dam, Copper Country, Michigan.

Writing Prompts. Love them? Hate them?

Most writers can point to a project that started or developed with a prompt.

Prompts prove useful when casting about for fresh writing projects. After all that prompt-based writing, however, steel yourself for slogging through the rubble to find gems.  

Revision work may be where prompt-based writing shines. Approach prompts with an ongoing project in mind. Seek material that deepens your text without sending the project on tangents. The results can be satisfying.

Escaping into the Open

Among the prompts worth visiting (or revisiting) are those in novelist Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open: The Art of True Writing. The book, which is nearing its 25th anniversary, includes a full chapter of prompts that shows “thinking less and writing more can become a very good habit.” While the book’s publishing industry advice is a bit dated, Berg’s encouragement and guidance on using details to bring writing alive continues to be timeless.    

Field trips

Berg recommends field trips or rather “plunking yourself down in a different environment” and writing about “everything you see and hear and feel, if only to make a list of sensations.”

Documenting the people, as well as your senses, can yield characterizations, such as “nose-ringed teenagers” and “pastel-cardiganed grandmothers,” to replace stickier, clunkier lines.

In terms of setting, Berg recommends focusing on ambient sounds that “can help your readers visualize a place.” For example, tune into the sounds after a church’s prayer vigil or lunchtime at a local diner.

On field trips, seek the details, updated metaphors, and memories (yours or your characters) that give weight to your words. In doing so, run through your senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

Speaking of taste and that field trip to a local diner, what would your character crave or try under duress? There’s a special place for food in both fiction and nonfiction writing, especially cuisine linked to a particular setting.

Red Flannel Hash

The opening paragraph of Pam Houston’s short story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” from The Best American Short Stories 1999, does a lot of work and refers to a specific food:  

“A perfect day in the city always starts like this: my fiend Leo picks me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann’s where they make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass and read poems out loud and talk about love.”

Red Flannel Hash? Beets?
Beyond Pam Houston’s story, I explored this new-to-me way to eat beets, one of nature’s so-called superfoods. I recommend this recipe from Taste of Home: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/red-flannel-hash/ The Red Flannel Hash recipe, which includes vegetarian options, calls for corned beef, but I used four slices of bacon to match the description in Houston’s story.

To “prime the subconscious pump,” try some prompt-based drafting and take writing-focused field trips. Consider the following prompt from Berg’s book to get you started:

“Describe five completely different types of people placing their order for coffee with the same waitress. Describe these people in appearance, movement, and speech. If you like, also describe the waitress’s reaction to them.”

Manuscript drafts benefit from a rest

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: High Rock from Romance Cliff, Dells of the Wisconsin River.

Even fresh from summer vacation, taking a break from writing may be just what you need

Sometimes the best thing for your writing is taking a break from your writing. As such, I’ve built in a “rest” period for all non-deadline projects.

For example, after saving a revision, a project might seem good (or even great). Finished.

Resist the temptation to market the manuscript right away, because… When you read that same file a week or more later, any glitches, typos, or flat-out errors will pop.

Save yourself from the cringy rereading of a rejected manuscript and realizing exactly why it was rejected. You probably sent it out months ago, and now, given some time and distance, you can see the problem(s) the editors saw. To make matters worse, most markets won’t accept resubmissions of rejected work, so you’ve burned a market for that project.

A week to the wise

Even when a manuscript feels done, note in your calendar to check it a week from now. If you don’t need to revise when you reread the text next week, the project is probably ready to market. If you revise again, schedule a check another week out.

After a rest period, you’re more likely to approach your manuscript fresh. You see what a reader sees, not what you think you wrote. You’re more likely to hear the glitches or repetitions. You’ll see where content is missing or extraneous—things you thought you covered or cut. Similarly, you are likely to see where the text works well, repeats, or slows to a slog.

A month?

For larger projects or more significant revisions, a month’s rest may be useful. Take a month away to clear your mind of all assumptions. In the meantime, work on other projects, prep work, marketing plans, reading, and so on. You may stumble upon solutions to issues in your work-in-progress that require further revising, restructuring, expanding, or contracting.    

The trick with rest periods is not letting a break turn into abandonment, defeat, or worse. Keep going back, even to those projects that fight you.

Blog roll

See the following blogs/sites for other perspectives on writing breaks:

Why writers should read ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain’ — Let George Saunders help you see more in the fiction you read and write

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: Lake Park and harbor view from lighthouse, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Recommended reading on the craft of fiction: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life) by George Saunders, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021

In grad school, I remember how few of my MFA cohorts would admit they had “What the heck?” reactions to some of our fiction reading assignments. They always “got it” or at least grinned enigmatically.

However, writer and professor George Saunders acknowledges that his students at Syracuse University have had what-the-heck reactions to the short stories he assigns. To elicit such honesty from students, Saunders must create a collegial space for questioning and exploration in his classrooms. His 2021 book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, demonstrates this mode of inquiry.

In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders shares the assigned readings, lectures, and discussions from his popular Syracuse course that examines the short fiction of several nineteenth-century Russian authors — Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol (who had Ukrainian roots). Within his analysis, Saunders acknowledges student critiques, such as that certain specifics seem like fluff.

Saunders shows how he can take a story that makes you shrug (and consider cutting by half) and helps you see how the writer’s craft works. At least once, he challenges you (and his students) to try cutting an assigned story, which turns out to be an insurmountable task.

These types of hands-on revelations are especially useful when turned to your own writing. Your awareness of what is and isn’t working in your own drafts grows after seeing these Russian stories through Saunders’s lens, alongside student and critical perspectives.    

One of the many concepts that will stick with me from this book is TICHN. “As we read a story (let’s imagine) we’re dragging along a cart labeled ‘Things I Couldn’t Help Noticing’ (TICHN),” Saunders writes.  Language choices, story structure, patterns, and so on — noted consciously (or not) — may fill the TICHN cart. For readers, the TICHN cart may offer aha! moments upon reflection. For writers, these elements may help bring together a story’s ending.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain starts by approaching a Chekhov story one digestible page at a time: page, discussion, page, discussion, and so on. The book continues with newer translations of the Russian short stories, with each story examined further in “Afterthoughts.” At times, Saunders offers discussions of discussions that break down the stories through outlines, editing challenges, and exercises for students.

It’s no secret that I would recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. As readers, this book helps us see how some notable fiction works. As writers, we can apply the knowledge and techniques revealed to our own fiction. As teachers or workshop participants, Saunders offers approaches and hands-on tasks to use in the classroom and beyond.  

Revision: Use the Read Aloud tool in Word to hear (and fix) glitches in your writing

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: Highway from Torrey Pines, on the Coast Route between Los Angeles and San Diego.

One of the following sentences includes a misused word:

A. “I defiantly think that word should be changed.” 
B. “I definitely think that word should be changed.”

Although B is preferred here, my students often type “defiantly” when they mean definitely. Neither spellcheck nor the grammar checker flags “defiantly” in this context. Nonetheless, imprecise and awkward word choices can be an issue in college essays, and in business and professional writing the stakes are higher.

Checking dictionary definitions can help pinpoint misused words, but another tactic is hearing your text read aloud.

Microsoft Word has tools for that

The “Read Aloud” tool in Microsoft Word helps you listen to your drafts. Hearing your words can help you identify (and fix) word-choice glitches, subject-verb agreement errors, misspellings, and more. Hearing the word “defiantly” when you meant “definitely” can spotlight a needed revision.

You’ll find “Read Aloud” on the Review screen’s toolbar in Word 2019, Word 2021, and Microsoft 365. You can customize this tool to read faster or slower, pause, skip forward or back a paragraph, and more. For more information, see the Microsoft support page, “Listen to your Word documents.”

If you’re using an older version of Word, you can still get the program to read your text to you. Add the Speak feature to your Word screen by following the five steps detailed by Microsoft at “Use the Speak text-to-speech feature to read text aloud.”

Pro tip: Find a fresh approach

Reading aloud, whether you read to yourself or use tech tools to read to you, is a strategy that professional writers use. I’ve seen reporters in newsrooms whispering their stories to themselves just before deadline. I’ve experienced the deep revision that comes from preparing to record a story for a website.

With text on screens, it can be easy to insert words and adjust sentences as you read. You keep adding the missing words or fixing the awkward sentences in your mind. However, the actual words in your file may say something different. Approaching your text fresh, so that you don’t rely on what should be there versus what is actually there, can help you avoid embarrassing mistakes.

Time can be a great resource for approaching a text fresh. In other words, put away your project for a week or more and then come back to it minus your assumptions. However, time can be a luxury that isn’t available when a due date or deadline is looming.

Whether you’re on deadline or not, hearing your words aloud can give you a fresh perspective that reading on screen over and over can’t.

Multilingual writers

Hearing a text can also be helpful for writers who are working in a second language. In my college writing classes, I’ve had students who are working in English when it’s their second or third language. I can point to a paragraph containing, for example, subject-verb agreement problems. When I ask them to read the paragraph aloud, they often fix the verb tense issues as they speak. They are often surprised when I point out the error in the text—the error they fixed when they read aloud.

For English speakers who are working in other languages, the Read Aloud tool can also be useful. The tool can be set to read in an array of languages.

Bookshelf: 3 how-to books on novel writing to keep your project moving

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: Moonlight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “America’s Super Highway.”

Working in tandem with a how-to book on the craft of novel writing can keep you connected to the big picture of your project. Writing creatively and critically at the same time can inch your novel project closer and closer to a satisfactory conclusion. Yay, a book!

Companion craft books (how-to books) can be lifesavers. They can keep you from drowning in detail or drifting wildly off course.

For example, sometimes you’re driven to figure “it” out. “It” may be big or small—from fixing the whole plot (big) to researching a telling character or setting detail (small). Depending on your tolerance for uncertainty, skipping a day (or more) of writing could become easy. Too easy. Weeks or months may pass since you’ve worked on your so-called passion project because you can’t figure “it” out.

Another example is that you may approach a novel project by writing and writing and writing. You think (hope) that one day your hefty word count will make great-American sense. However, you can end up with a hundred-thousand sprawling words that don’t fit well into current publishing models, unless you’re Diana Gabaldon or Thomas Pynchon.

Whether you’re just getting started or you’ve encountered one of those days when you don’t know what to do, how-to books on the craft of novel writing can keep your project moving forward. Nonetheless, while the following books, workbooks, and videos are great resources, the key is you. You need to keep working, keep trying.

Here are three how-to books on novel writing I recommend:

Story Genius by Lisa Cron

Story Genius by Lisa Cron. This 2016 book’s subtitle and sub-subtitle explain Cron’s approach, “How to use brain science to go beyond outlining and write a riveting novel* [*Before you waste three years writing 327 pages that go nowhere].”

Story Genius chapters on novel-craft include “What To Do” tasks that prompt you to examine the parameters of your current project. The tasks help writers avoid common glitches, such as neglecting to identify a main character or forgetting why your protagonist wants what s/he wants.  

“The reason that the vast majority of manuscripts are rejected—either by publishers or by readers—is because they do not have a third rail,” writes Cron. “Story is about an internal struggle, not an external one… [T]he internal problem predates the events in the plot, often by decades.”

Also check out: Curious to learn more about the “brain science” aspect of storytelling from the subtitle? Check out Lisa Cron’s 2014 TEDx Talk “Wired for Story” or her previous book by the same name, Wired for Story.

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need by Jessica Brody. Brody adapts lessons originally intended for screenwriters to the needs of novelists. To make a story worth telling, Brody says you need “plot, structure, and character transformation. Or what I like to call the ‘Holy Trinity of Story.’”

The book provides exercises, checklists, and examples of how novels (and later movies), such as The Help, The Kite Runner, and Bridget Jones’s Diary, follow the 15-beat structure at the center of Blake Snyder’s 2005 screenplay-writing book Save the Cat! Brody adapts Snyder’s beat sheets, four-act structure, A- and B-stories, and more to the needs of novelists.

Brody includes manuscript percentages to help novelists know “What Goes Where.” For example, the “All Is Lost” beat should occur at about 75 percent of the manuscript with the “Dark Night of the Soul” following at 75-80 percent. Whether you’re writing novels for schoolchildren or adults, genre manuscript lengths can range from 160 manuscript pages to almost 600 pages. That’s why Brody’s percentages are useful across genres.

Also check out: If you have access to LinkedIn Learning, check out Brody’s course, “Write a Bestselling Novel in 15 Steps.” By using the Save the Cat! Writes a Novel book along with the online LinkedIn course you can speed up or slow down, as needed, to run your novel project through the “Save the Cat” method.

Writing the Breakout Novel & Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass

Writing the Breakout Novel’s subtitle, “Insider advice for taking your fiction to the next level,” refers to the author’s background as the president of Donald Maass Literary Agency in New York and the broker of publishing deals with “six- or seven-figure advances.”

Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, published three years later in 2004, offers “hands-on help for making your novel stand out and succeed.” By going beyond reading and notetaking with Maass’s “breakout” book, the workbook satisfies the need to dive into planning and drafting. Both the book and the workbook offer eye-opening information that can shake you out of the leisurely sail that you think might be a novel. Following the workbook lessons helps you to write smarter and stronger to create a more marketable novel. 

3 blogs that flog, deconstruct or explain the choices fiction writers and editors make

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment
Vintage postcard: Soldiers Field & Field Museum at the Chicago lakefront.

Miss those fiction workshop critiques of other writers’ work? Maybe? I remember having a lot of time to doodle in MFA workshops, especially when the conversations turned contentious. Then, moments of constructive feedback would connect to my own writing and lead to furious notetaking.

Reminiscent of the best graduate school critique sessions, the following three blog series offer insights into the craft of fiction writing. We have the added knowledge that whatever worked (or not) in the stories has resulted in publication.

Flog a Pro: Would You Pay to Turn the Page of This Bestseller?

In monthly posts on Writer Unboxed, Ray Rhamey provides a novel’s first 17 lines and asks “Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter?” And, by extension, would you be willing to risk money and time to read the book, especially if you were a busy literary agent?

After the novel’s opening lines, Rhamey shares his verdict, explains his reasoning, and polls blog readers for their verdicts and comments. Reader comments, along with Rhamey’s own, offer useful perspectives into storytelling choices and their consequences. The series has examined books by Elin Hilderbrand, Kristin Hannah, Stephen King, and John Grisham, among others. The outcomes can be surprising, especially when the writing of a well-known novelist doesn’t conform to commonly held writing advice. (Note: The opening of Stephen King’s most recent novel didn’t fare as well as you might think.)

Ray Rhamey offers the opportunity for writers to receive similar feedback on their works in progress through his Flogging the Quill blog. Rhamey is the author of five nonfiction books, including Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling, and four novels in genres such as political thrillers and contemporary fantasy.

Let’s Deconstruct a Story

“Let’s Deconstruct a Story: A Podcast for the Story Nerds” is a series of podcasts and blog posts that include author interviews conducted by Kelly Fordon, who teaches writing in the Detroit area and has published two short story collections and a poetry collection.

August’s post featured an interview with Susan Perabo about her story “This Is Not That Story,” which appeared in The Sun in March 2006. Perabo, whose most recent book is They Run the Way They Do, ended the interview by saying, “I love getting into the choices and the questions that only deep reading and deep thinking can get you to. I think you’re doing a great service for writers and for students of writing, and that’s all of us, right?” 

As with all critique sessions, you should read the story first, and Fordon provides links to the texts under discussion. Her posts often go beyond the basics. For example, in a deconstruction of the story “Creve Coeur” by Jacob M. Appel, Fordon created a word cloud from the adjectives Appel used. It’s telling that the words “dark” and gray” stand out, as do the words “indifferent” and “happy.”

NOTE: Beyond deconstructing someone else’s story, creating a word cloud for your own work can be a useful editing and revision tool for exploring a story’s tone and the ideas or themes being explored.

“I’m basically offering these workshops on ‘Let’s Deconstruct a Story’ for my own gratification because I feel like I learn so much from studying the stories of other writers,” says Fordon at the beginning of her work with Appel’s short story. “Really delving into them. Seeing how they work, the mechanics, so I can get some more tools for my own toolbox.”

(Thank you to Erika Dreifus and her “Practicing Writer” blog for bringing Kelly Fordon’s work to my attention.)

Why We Chose It

The Kenyon Review’s blog includes the occasional feature “Why We Chose It” written by the literary magazine’s fiction and nonfiction editors. Posts in the series link to a current selection from the Kenyon Review so that you can read the text being discussed. For veterans of lit-mag rejections, the posts offer insight into what drew an editor to a particular story.

In a recent “Why We Chose It” post, the Kenyon Review’s Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky focuses on the short story “Caduceus” by Perry Lopez, which appeared in the magazine’s July/August 2021 issue. Kenyon Review is published six times a year at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Bookshelf: 4 reference books to sharpen the details in your writing

/ melissaolsonpetrie / Leave a comment

Postcard bridge on Pennsylvania Turnpike 20_0810 - Copy

Vintage postcard: Beautiful bridge on Pennsylvania’s Turnpike in the Bedford Narrows.

One of the authors I worked with described his home as “El Rancho Indebto.” That description — from author Daniel Gray’s books, such as Adobe ImageStyler In Depth — has stuck with me even though it has been years since I’ve worked in educational publishing.

Dan had a way of twisting words to make them more interesting amid chapters on how to apply the techniques of web design and develop software expertise. I have to apologize in arrears for probably thwarting some of his descriptions. For example, I remember him writing the lesser-known “stop on a nickel,” and I might have changed it to the tired, old “stopped on a dime.”

In any case, finding the right words, the less tired words, the memorable words, can bring your writing to life. It’s a constant battle I’ve fought by seeking the telling details that deepen scenes.

In my search for the right words, I’ve accumulated a few trusted books that go beyond the thesaurus and Google searches. Books I continue to turn to include:

Random House Word Menu by Stephen Glazier – Struggling to describe the lights and mirrors in a setting? This reference gives you a list, along with short definitions, to help you decide if your setting has a gaslight or a torchiere. A pier glass or a looking glass. See the “Lamps and Mirrors” section.

The Describer’s Dictionary by David Grambs – The subtitle is “A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations for Readers and Writers.” Want to give a character a trademark ring or pendant? Scan the “Common Emblems and Symbols” chapter. Consider the implications of whether your character would wear a peaceful ankh (a “loop-topped cross”) or a human skull, “as a symbol of mortality, death’s head, memento mori.” This book is half word lists and half literary excerpts so you can see how authors have employed these details.

DK Ultimate Visual Dictionary – This book is all about images and labels. Want to know the name for that little chute between your character’s nose and lips? A philtrum. (As an aside, some believe the width of this chute is an indicator of a person’s fertility.) Need your character to encounter a horse and touch its leg or head? You might want to know the difference between a fetlock and a forelock. A fetlock is a joint somewhat similar to a human’s ankle, and a forelock is the hair between a horse’s ears that often falls forward like bangs.

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi – This book is part of a series of emotion and setting thesauruses. Want to go beyond saying your character is upset? Look at the “Agitation” chapter and browse through the physical signs, internal sensations, mental responses, and other cues to deepen your character’s responses and lead to telling details. If your character was abandoned or neglected as a child, check another book in the series, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma for examples, false beliefs, fears, potential personality traits, triggers, and more.

Why turn to books when there’s Wikipedia, Google, and other online resources? The more curated content found within these reference books (whether paper or ebook) can save you from falling into a rabbit hole (or as Dan Gray might say, a woodchuck hole) of clicks.

And speaking of clicks and tired descriptors, check your writing against the visual essay “The Physical Traits that Define Men & Women in Literature” written by Erin Davis and illustrated by Liana Sposto at The Pudding.

Davis scanned 2,000 books, including bestsellers, prize winners, and books commonly assigned in U.S. high schools and colleges. She used a language processor to see what body parts and adjectives were most commonly used to describe male and female characters. The interactive visual aspects of the Pudding essay allow you to test some of your assumptions about gender and descriptors. (Thank you to Jane Friedman’s “Electric Speed” newsletter for recommending this article.)

Revision: Use text-to-speech in Word to hear what works (and what doesn’t) in your writing

/ melissaolsonpetrie / 2 Comments

Postcard Stephen Collins Foster garden 20_0126 copy - Copy

Vintage postcard: Where Stephen Collins Foster wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” near Bardstown.

Before the daily 11 a.m. deadline, the loudest sounds in the newsroom came from reporters tapping out stories on their keyboards. There wasn’t much talking, but lips moved as the reporters tested out their words in whispers before filing their articles with the editors.

I tell my students about this. “It’s what professional writers do. Read your work aloud. You’ll hear the glitches and errors. I do it all the time.”

Some of the deepest editing I’ve done came while recording a short story for Superstition Review (both audio and text of “To Walk Chalk” appeared in Issue 21). I had trouble with the Audible sound editing application and background noises, so not only did I read the story aloud several times, but I also had to listen to it again and again. This aural scrutiny led me beyond fixing the usual sentence errors to more in-depth revisions regarding characterization and recurring elements that tightened the focus of the story. I continue to work toward this higher level of revision in my current projects.

One drawback of reading your work aloud is that part of you is performing, whether or not anyone is listening. If you’re preparing for a public appearance or recording an audio file, this practice is great. However, if revision is your goal, the performative aspects of reading aloud—whether to look up while reading, whether you’re reading too fast or too slow, and how your voice sounds—can be distracting.

This is where the “Speak” feature in Microsoft Word can help. (Thank you to my student, T.J., who mentioned this to me.) Unlike older “readers,” such as databases that provide an uninflected robot voice to read journal articles in either an American or British accent, Word’s text-to-speech feature usually seems smooth enough to let you focus on your words, not the tone of the software.

When I’m listening and not distracted by the physical act of reading, I catch more sentence-level glitches and repetitions along with larger issues that show up throughout the text. For example, do the descriptions of a particular character or setting provide a cohesive mindset or image? Are there unintended contradictions or missing bits of information?

I added the Speak feature to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of my Word screen, and I’m able to pop into and out of hearing how my words are working. I just highlight the paragraphs I want to hear and click on the Speak icon (as I’ve done with this blog post).

To add the Speak feature to your Word screen you’ll need to follow the five steps explained at: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Speak-text-to-speech-feature-to-read-text-aloud-459e7704-a76d-4fe2-ab48-189d6b83333c

No matter how you do it, the act of listening to your words, is a useful revision tactic. It’s time well spent, as is the time spent setting up the text-to-speech feature in Word.

Add Speak to the Quick Access Toolbar

In case the link to Microsoft’s Office Support site breaks, I’ll copy the steps here. Add the Speak command to your Quick Access Toolbar by doing the following while you’re in Word:

  1. Next to the Quick Access Toolbar, click “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.”
    Quick access toolbar in Word
  2. Click “More Commands.”
  3. In the “Choose commands from” list, select “All Commands.”
  4. Scroll down to the “Speak” command, select it, and then click “Add.”
  5. Click “OK.”

Again, here is the link: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Speak-text-to-speech-feature-to-read-text-aloud-459e7704-a76d-4fe2-ab48-189d6b83333c

A newer three R’s for writing: Reject, revise, and repeat

/ melissaolsonpetrie / 1 Comment

Chicago World's Fair sky ride 2 - Copy

Vintage postcard: Sky ride, Chicago World’s Fair, 1933

Some literary magazines offer a few sentences of feedback if you pay a couple of dollars more for your submissions. A few sentences or a paragraph or two is what you get—not a full critique.

While a full critique can cost hundreds of dollars, a couple of dollars seems worthwhile to get something beyond the generic rejection of “doesn’t fit our needs,” “wasn’t right for us,” “unable to accept,” “not selected for publication,” and so on.

Note: On Submittable.com, you can search using the words feedback or comment to get a list of current submission opportunities that have a feedback option.

Nonetheless, feedback isn’t always easy to take. Here’s an excerpt from comments I received recently:

I liked this story, but a good amount happens here that doesn’t move the story forward. Some of it is in extraneous description; some of it is action. Reading these bits, I can see how they are good writing, but they don’t quite contribute to the story, which bogs down the reading experience overall.

This feedback applied to a short-short story of about 700 words. My first reaction was, “If you took out the description and the action, what would be left?” But then, the feedback only referred to “extraneous” description and “some” action. Where was it?

I reread the story and let it sit for a week. For me, time is an important revision tool. You come back to a piece with many assumptions forgotten, much like a new reader. More than once, I’ve reread a rejected manuscript and thought, “Rightly so.” Problems jumped out at me, but this short-short wasn’t one of those.

Having been taught to show not tell, I looked at elements in the story that were supposed to show. What I was showing didn’t seem to be coming across, if the feedback was any indication. I brought back a few of the story elements I had cut earlier. This also involved reordering some material to smooth progressions and connections. I had waffled over much of this earlier in the drafting process and had opted for a more streamlined piece, leaving much lurking but unsaid. Now, I was putting some of these things back in.

The story is resting again, like dough. We’ll see what rises with the next rereading, as well as the next steps in the submission/feedback process. Maybe these revisions have gone too far, and I’ll need to dial them back again. We’ll see.