Normally I start the semester with a discussion of opening paragraphs, which seems a sensible place. However, in an exciting break from my own routine, I decided to begin this semester with a class on revision, a topic I don’t usually get to until week 9. By then everyone’s usually thrashed their way through a number of critiques. The last class is always about publishing and I know people want me to finish nattering on about revision so we can get to the good stuff. So I’m usually rushing through revision myself.

For this semester I decided to take a different tack. I decided to separate revision out from publication and put it at the start of the class. My hope is that not only can my classes discuss it, but we can also embrace it. Specifically I want to move past the notion of the idea of revision as being “fixing errors.” I want a more holistic approach to revision. I want students to view it not as a necessary evil but as an opportunity to explore their manuscripts and bring out deeper meanings that may have been dormant in early drafts. I want to get past the fear!

Of course, the only problem is that it’s hard to teach. I can tell you what a good opening paragraph looks like, but a good revision is much harder to quantify. A good sign is if The New Yorker agrees to buy it, but even an unpublished story can be successfully revised. There are some things, however, that can help.

1. Have a title that works. Almost always, if the title’s good, the story’s good. The reason is that an author with a title knows what the story’s about. So challenge yourself to come up with a good title.

2. Retype the story. From the beginning. Novels too. Don’t try to squeeze every little correction into the draft. Take a bold approach and start from scratch.

3. Cut out a quarter of the words. You don’t need them. Trust me.

How about you? Do you have any tips for revision?

I teach Beginning and Advanced Fiction for Gotham, but the trickiest classes I teach are in novel writing. The classes tend to be large (for Gotham), meaning they have from ten to fourteen people, each one in the middle of writing a novel, which means lots and lots of pages to read and discuss. But that’s not the problem.

The scope of the critiquing is more difficult in a novel writing class. Not only are we reading the pages under submission, but we’ve got to consider them in the context of what came before and what should come after. If we’re discussing chapter four, for example, you really need figure out how that builds from chapter one, which we read probably three weeks ago. Given that I have difficulty remembering the day of the week it is, this global viewpoint requires a bit of effort on my part. However, even that’s not the problem.

The problem, at the moment, is that one of my students suggested it would be interesting if, on top of the classwork and lectures, I added in a discussion of Jonathan Franzen’s big book, FREEDOM. The idea’s a great one. Everyone writing a novel today should be familiar with FREEDOM, I think. Certainly if you’re writing a literary novel. This has been widely reviewed as the book of the year, or the decade. Whether you like it or not (and I gave it four stars on Goodreads), you have to deal with it.

But how on earth to incorporate that novel into a ten-week class? This has been what’s preoccupying me over break. I can’t assign the whole book to read. There’d be an insurrection. We could read part of the book. Normally I’d suggest reading the opening 50 pages, but I think the beginning of Franzen’s book is the least inviting part of it. Quite honestly, I think only he could get away with such an unsympathetic beginning. I considered having each class member read a different twenty pages and report back, but that would deny us all a certain narrative thrust. Then I considered kicking the student who proposed the idea out of the class and forgetting about the whole thing, but that seemed hostile.

So I have two weeks to go before class starts. Any suggestions?