You’ve Gotta be Cruel to be Kind, in the Right Measure

One of my less helpful self-editing techniques: being mean to myself.

Revising a novel is a lot like popping a zit. It hurts. It’s gross. You don’t want anyone else to watch you do it. But it’s usually necessary, and everybody has their own method.

Here are a few I’ve tried, some of which have actually worked. Others have severe side effects, like staring out the window for an entire day, filling out several job applications after giving up all of your hopes and dreams of being a writer, and wine spritzers.

The Mean Girls Method

This method involves a red pen, a burn book, and holding your face two inches from the mirror to ask yourself why your pores look like that. You are your own worst bully. You tell yourself you write like a kindergartener, no one will ever want to read this pile of wet mulch, and you might as well bury it in the backyard under all the Old Navy spaghetti straps and platform flip flips you can’t believe you wore in your youth. Pray that no one ever finds it, or you will transfer to a different school, in a different district, in a different state, in a different galaxy.

Every writer knows the Mean Girls Method. I don’t need to teach it to you. You were born with it. And you will never be able to banish the mean girl in your head completely, but—hot take alert—I’m not sure you should.

When I finish a draft, I have a moment of euphoria. It is brief. That’s why I called a moment. That brief moment of euphoria is not the time to send out the draft to every literary agent or magazine in the stratosphere. If it were, no meaningful revision would ever happen. Your euphoric bubble needs to pop so that you have the necessary perspective to do the hard work that comes next—that, no, your draft is not perfect, because no draft is ever perfect. So put a timer on the mean girl and listen to what she has to say for five minutes before uninviting her from your birthday party.

The Save the Cat Method

A look at my Amazon history will reveal that I have ordered an embarrassing number of books about how to write a novel. The 90-Day Novel, The Anatomy of Story, First Draft in 30 Days. I bought books on voice, books on character, books on suspense. I never finished a draft in 30 days, or 90 days, or any amount of days, really. It took years. None of these books are quick fixes that will solve all your writing woes and turn you into Zadie Smith or Alice Munro, but they are not useless either. Every one of these how-to guides provoked a new thought, a new idea, a new strategy, or a new angle that I hadn’t thought of before. But where you really get your money’s worth is on revision.

By far the best one of these how-to-write-a-novel bibles is Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. It describes each stage of the novel—or beat on the beat sheet—in a way that makes sense to everyone who has ever read a book or seen a movie, no MFA required. After I read this book, I wrote down every scene in my book on a notecard. I had nowhere to eat for a week:

Then I organized these cards into each beat on the Save the Cat! beat sheet. For example, there’s a big party in my novel where tensions between friends come to a head and relationships start to unravel. I labeled this scene “the fundraiser” and I was able to put it in the ‘midpoint’ beat of the beat sheet (which you can find if you google it). This strategy revealed that the flow of my second half did not fit into the traditional beat sheet at all. I had way too many scenes, and then a rushed resolution with a neat little bow. Several days of staring at myself forlornly in the mirror and shaking my head at the heavens followed. Eventually I picked out the notecards containing the scenes that did not fit anywhere, thanked them for their service, and put them down the garbage disposal. In other words, I cut them from the draft, and huzzah! They were not missed.

The point is that Save the Cat! will provide you a lens through which to examine your completed project to make sure you hit the right notes and cut the extra stuff. But a strongly worded word of caution: taking the beat sheet too literally will cause you to feel like ants have crawled into your pants, up your neck, and into your hair. You will then want to rip your skin off. Save the Cat! and it’s associated worksheets provide actual word counts, e.g., the Catalyst should happen at word 9,828 in a 90,000 word novel. Like speed limits, this is a suggestion. Okay, not like speed limits. Like the expiration dates on Tylenol. Every novel is different, and if you try to force yours exactly into the prescribed word counts or beats, you will never succeed, and the uniqueness of your novel will suffer.

The Rewrite Method

Open your draft. Move it to the left side of your screen. Open a blank word document, and move it to the right side of your screen. In the blank document, type ‘Chapter 1.’

Now start over.

I am only 10% kidding.

This method is a slow burn. The goal is not to transcribe your draft, the goal is to reexamine it, and when you’re simply re-reading a page that you’ve read a hundred times before, your brain switches into proof-reading mode. It will read a paragraph, and only the most extreme mistakes will jump out at you. But when you are rewriting your entire draft, every word is a choice. Every word must pass a test to make it onto the new page. If that word is not 100% perfect for the action or feeling you’re trying to convey, it’s not worth the energy required to move your fingers across the keyboard to write it down. For me, the test is this hiccup I get in my gut that something is not right. It’s like tripping over an uneven sidewalk that interrupts the auto-pilot of walking just enough that I’m forced to look down. I have trained myself to listen to this feeling. I will not move on to the next sentence until I’ve addressed it. In earlier drafts, my mantra was often ‘it’s fine for now,’ but eventually you run out of ‘nows’ and now is the very last now. If you publish your novel, there will come a time when you can’t make any more changes, so it’s now or never, baby. You might as well have fixed it while you had the chance. I am loathe to admit the number of times that, when I was working in big law, I would see a mistake in a brief and think, I’ll fix it when I’m proofreading. Fast forward to 11:59 pm when I’m trying to file that brief on time and never fixed the period that was trailing after a close paren instead of inside it.

The Rewrite Method is the antithesis of rushing. I know the hunger to finish a draft, the eagerness to be done. Let that feeling motivate you to finish your first draft, but not your second or third or fourth. Those drafts are slow burns. You’ve already hooked up with your first draft in a crashing-down-the-hallway kind of way. This time, enjoy the process and get it right.

Unfortunately, these methods are not for picking and choosing. You gotta hit em all, and then a few others, and then some more after that.