Book Talk…2/10/17
Traci Kenworth
Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft by Janice Hardy. 2016
The book is broken into workshops such as: Revision Prep. Character Work. Plot and Structure Work. Point of View work. Description Work. Setting and World-building Work. Dialogue and Voice Work. Pacing Work. Word Count Work. A Final Look. And Salvaging Half-finished manuscripts.
In for instance, Character Work, you discuss: Analyzing your characters. Analyzing Character Arcs. Backstory. Theme. Role or number of characters. Wrong protagonist. Wrong Antagonist. Too many characters. Fill out the characters. Adjust the Character Descriptions. Strengthen the Character Art Balance the Backstory. Ways to hide the backstory. If you need more backstory, not less. Develop the theme. Adding the theme.
I love how she takes you through every angle of a story. And you don’t have to revise in the order she’s suggesting. You can skip and choose what you need, what you don’t. I’m just beginning my journey through the workshops so I’ll let you know how they work when applied but she offers some good advice. To begin, she recommends you fill in the holes: any scenes you haven’t written (three, for me), any research you need to doublecheck (a great idea to get things solidified), and re-thinking any major issues or plot holes. Next up, she asks that you summarize each chapter, something I’ve read as advice from James Scott Bell. I started doing this while writing, but some things have changed so I’ll need to do some backtracking. This allows you to see any plot holes that need taken care of.
A lot of good in this book and if you read her Fiction University blogs, you know she knows her stuff!
