Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Writing Lab. Here’s where I try to impart some knowledge of writing I’ve managed to pick up in the twenty-five-plus years of experience I’ve had with the art in a way which might be useful to you, the reader. This is especially the case if you want to write yourself.

Over the past couple of months since I’ve started this Writing Lab, I’ve decided to do a series on the revising process. We started with a quick review of revising and how it fits into the writing process, and then I continued with a broad overview of my own revising process and its basic workings.

On Revising, Part 3 (of ?): Regarding word count and reducing it for fun and creativity

I think that I reached a new level of maturity as a writer a few years ago when I cut 1,000 words from the manuscript I was working on at the time and I was as excited about that as I was writing 1,000 new words.

For several years, I taught writing either primarily or as part of my other language arts instruction in the general education classroom. Now, I teach special education, but I do advise many of my students regarding their writing, and some of them have writing goals that I work with them on.

Some of them have been eager writers, and some of them I’ve had to figuratively drag onto the page. But one common problem many of them have had was that they considered the process of writing to be:

1. Get an idea.
2. Write it down.

As I explained to you at the start of this series, that is not the case. Again, I believe revision is where the true heart of writing takes place, a lesson I have tried to impart on my students and something I’ve worked to structure my instruction around. At the junior college level, for example, I always found more essay peer review and instructor review had more value for the students than any live lecture that I gave.

“Liegois, you must have always been a great revising wiz, then,” you might or might not say. Or, it might be the voices in my head. However, I would respond to this statement by saying – Reader, there were a few holes in my game¹.

Specifically, the one hole that I am thinking of is that I tended to write a lot more than I needed to. A lot more.

You’ve got to remember, I was the guy who turned a relatively simple journalism thriller into a 160,000-word opus. After I wrote it, I began reading all of the writing advice articles that said to avoid anything bigger than 100,000 words unless you were Stephen King or George RR Martin or whatever. Obviously, the idea of cutting more than one-third of an existing novel horrified me.

Until, that is, I actually did it.

Reader, you will never be as hyped as you will be when you cut that 2,000 or so words from your manuscript and realize that nothing of value has been lost. Oh, my goodness, the relief you will feel from having all of those unnecessary words fall away from your work will be nothing like you’ve ever felt. It will be like the old lumbermen of the Mississippi River clearing a log jam from a bend of the river and watching the logs flow into the main channel. (I get to use the river metaphors because I live on the river, got it?)

I may have told this story before², but I realized something about myself in my former, unfettered form, when I wrote and never had a care for how much I wrote – I wrote a lot. People tended to tell me I had an ear for dialogue when they read my stuff, which was nice – I’m a massive admirer of Elmore Leonard, so I was down with that. The only problem was, I wrote pages and pages of it. I wound up writing three pages of dialogue in a situation where one page of dialogue would have done. I realized that I should have taken in the example of Clint Eastwood when he cut out much of the dialogue from that one movie of his when he realized he didn’t need it.

The point is, when I started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K without too much hassle.

The point is, when I started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K without too much hassle.

The point is, when I actually started to look at what my characters were saying, I realized that they only had to say it once (maybe twice, if they were nervous), but no more than that. Once I realized that, my manuscript started to shed words 1K at a time without too much hassle. After several months, I was down to a manuscript that I could live with.

I know I am not alone in having this problem. And when I say this, I am referring specifically to one author I am a big fan of, Laurell K. Hamilton. I’m such a fan that I have, at this minute, something around a dozen paperbacks of her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series on my bookshelves.

But she goes on and on. There’s sex scenes that could fit into one chapter rather than two, dialogue that could wrap up after a half-page rather than three pages. None of this makes me want to not read her. However, I want to try and avoid the same pitfalls in my own work. (You should be reading other people’s work for what you should avoid just as much as what you should emulate.)

When I started writing The Yank Striker, I had word count in the front of my mind the minute that I started to write the rough draft. I quickly realized, as I went through my notes on the project and started to judge what could fit into less than 100,000 words, that I had more of a series on my hands than a single work. I remembered the stories about how J. R. R. Tolkien shopped around his manuscript of Lord of The Rings around to his buds on the University of Cambridge campus and that they were horrified at the size of the manuscript. He wanted to put the entire Lord of The Rings story into a single volume, can you believe it? He finally got talked into splitting it into a trilogy.

The point is, words are important. Use them wisely. Artistic restrictions can be good for you more so than they can be bad.

On the next writing lab, I’ll discuss another aspect of revising. I’m honestly not sure how many entries there will be in this series, but there will be at least a few more.

Also, I’m going to make sure this time to post a Substack Note related to this post, asking those of you with writing and/or revising questions to share them in the responses. I’d love to hear from you and maybe help you with that one project you’ve wanted to get you across the finish line.

See you then.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

1. This statement should not imply no further holes in said game do not exist. ↩︎
2. Famous last words. ↩︎

One of the biggest observations I’ve ever made about writing is you need to work with what works for you. By this, I mean the art of writing is a very individual process. What works for me, or you, might not necessarily work for each other or for other people; or, it might work but in a heavily modified format.

In this spirit, this week’s writing lab is a continuation of what I began to talk about last month; namely, the task of revising. Where before I went over some of the basics of revision and how it fits into the overall writing process (spoiler; it might be the biggest part of the process), in this post I’m going to go over some basics of how I structure my own revisions and what it looks like for me.

On Revising, Part 2 (of ?): My System: an overview

As I mentioned in the last Writing Lab post, the revising process is something that can be repeated (theoretically) to infinity but (practically) for anywhere from between three to five “rounds” of revisions. Based on everything I said, I’m not set on giving you one hard and fast number you have to stick with all the time. One rule of thumb, however, might be this: Take whatever number or revision rounds you come up with and add one or two to it.

I like to keep track of what changes I make to a document and the differences that come with those changes. But, I’m a lazy person in that I don’t want to give myself a lot of extra unnecessary work. So, I borrowed something from the software world for this process.

I designate the rough draft of every manuscript I write as “Book Project (or whatever its working title is) 1.0.” Whenever it is time for me to start my revisions, I will make a duplicate of the file and then retitle it “Book Project 2.0,” thus letting me know this is the first version of a manuscript now being revised. When it is time to do another full revision, you simply make a copy of the manuscript you are working on and then retitle it Book Project 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and so on.

What happens if you are making minor changes, or you are only concentrating on one aspect of the manuscript to review? Well, let’s say you decided to see if you didn’t retell a background story to one of your characters or your setting more than a half dozen times. Then, you might make a copy of your manuscript and title it something like Book Project 2.1 or Book Project 2.5. The convenience of this procedure for me is it allows me to make as many smaller changes to a story and I don’t run out of numbers to keep it straight in my head (ex., Book Project 2.5, 2.6, 2.61, 2.8, 2.812, etc.). On most electronic documents like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, it allows you to make notes on the document itself. I can use it to write down comments regarding any major changes to the manuscript.

Exactly what each of those revisions covers is another good question. There are those who believe you should try to look at every aspect of a manuscript in a revision. While I do think it might be a good idea to do this for your first revision, afterwards you might want to fix your attention to one big idea to address in each of your later rounds. Some examples of what some of these big ideas can be include:

• Word count. There are plenty of advice articles on how big your manuscripts should be. The consensus is that genre books and most fiction should be under 100,000 words or less. If you haven’t been watching your word count, that could result in a lot of sentences, paragraphs, or even scenes and chapters you must eliminate from your work.
  You might think it’s impossible to cut a 160,000-word manuscript down below 100,000, but trust me, it is possible. I wound up doing this for my first novel, The Holy Fool. That required a lot of scene cuts and me removing something of a subplot from my novel, but I managed it.
• Continuity issues. I remember a scene from the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger film Commando where a car is trashed rolling onto its side, Arnold rolls it right side up, and he drives away in a perfectly maintained car. You want to avoid similar silliness, which can come from calling one thing by two different names or having one thing in two different places.
  In the process of writing my second novel, The Yank Striker, I changed the name of a soccer club halfway through my rough draft, so I wound up having to change pages of description¹. It was worth it, but you must be meticulous when you do it.
• Other big ideas. Is your main character unlikable? Do you need to give more or less background to your story? Are there subplots that are just fizzling out? Is the pace of your book off, or it takes too long to get going? This is where your heavy lifting happens.

On the next writing lab, I’ll go into some of these processes I skimmed over above and discuss them in more detail. Along the way, I’ll also go into how I’ve used the revising process to make improvements for my books and writings before publication. See you then.

Also, I’m going to post a related Substack Note for this post², asking those of you with writing and/or revising questions to share them in the responses. I’d love to hear from you and maybe help you with that one project you’ve wanted to get you across the finish line.

See you then.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.

1. The reason for this was due to my obsessiveness for research. I originally named the soccer team from the East End of London which recruits my main character, DJ Ryan, as Donchester FC. However, in speaking online to some people from England, they explained names with Chester as a suffix (meaning camp or fort) were not common in the East End area but those ending with Ford (meaning river crossing). So, Donchester FC became Donford FC. ↩︎
2. Find me there at jasonliegoisauthor.substack.com. ↩︎

Welcome to a brand new experiment here at The Writing Life.

Experiment might be a bit too bold of a word. What I’m thinking of might be an adjustment or a refinement. Frankly, just doing a regular newsletter even twice a month seems to be a bit of repetitiveness (imagine if I were still doing it once a week lol). I want to provide a bit more value for subscribing to me, even if it’s a free subscription in your case.

So, I’ve decided to invite you into my virtual writing lab. My actual writing lab, my regular writing space, is the deep dark basement of my home (actually, it has some pretty extensive lighting if I turn it all on). But now you can enter a virtual writing lab, where I discuss some of the tricks of the trade I’ve learned over the past 30 or so years of writing and some of the struggles I’ve undergone along the way.

For the first of these Writing Labs, I decided to touch on a subject I’m knee-deep in during the next few months I’ve been working on what I’ve been calling The Yank Striker 2, and it’s what I often call the real heart of writing – revisions. Call this Part 1 in an extended review of the subject.

On Revising, Part 1 (of ?): The basics

I suppose you could currently classify me as a writing teacher because I do teach students writing skills. However, as a special education teacher, I wind up teaching or at least reteaching a wide amount of subjects. But, for much of my earlier time as a teacher, I often taught writing to students from middle school to the junior college level.

During the time that I taught in the college environment, I always wanted to lay out what the writing process looked like, in a similar manner that Vince Lombardi would explain to his players what a football was before beginning practice. As part of that, I’d include a graphic in my PowerPoint to the class where I would illustrate that writing process to the class. It looked like this:

This is about as simple a representation of the writing process there is. The steps are:

1. Prewrite – coming up with your idea and making initial plans for what it will look like.
2. Draft – putting the first version of your writing down on paper/computer screen/etc.
3. Revise – reviewing your work for possible improvements regarding its ideas, organization, or style.
4. Edit – reviewing your work for grammatical, mechanical, or formatting errors.
5. Publish – putting your final version of your work out for the general public to see.

For most people, steps 1 and 2 are usually the only ones they might think of or heard of. You think of something, you write it down – easy enough.

But it’s not that easy. Even the above diagram only hints at that complexity. For example, right after step 4, we could easily loop back to step 3 for another go-around, and then yet another. Professional novelists usually go through several revisions and edits for a single book; I’ve heard of some screenplays with a dozen or more.

My personal experience with writing and teaching writing for the past 30 years or so has left me convinced revising is the absolute key step to the writing process. It’s the engine driving everything else. It’s where you look at all the drivel you’ve dribbled onto the paper and screen and try not to recoil in horror. If drafting is taking a whole stack of 3×5 cards covered in notes, flinging them into the air, and letting them scatter across a table, revising is sorting all those cards out and seeing how they relate to each other.

So, what exactly does revising cover? What is part of this part of the process?

• Ideas – Essentially anything involving the substance of what you write. This includes:
  • Your main character. Is he sympathetic? Is he unlikable, and is it a problem for your story? (Sometimes it is.) Does his motivation make sense? Is his path through the plot clear?
  • Do you spend too little time developing your supporting characters or too much time? Either one could be a problem. Do you even need some of them, or do all those characters crowd out the story?
  • Are there any difficulties with your setting? For fantasy and science fiction writers, you are going to have to spend much more time with world building so your readers have some clue to where everything is taking place.
  • Do you have a clear handle on your plot and major plot points? Is there a lot of time in the middle where not much happens? Maybe you need to tighten things up.
  • Are those subplots making the story interesting or are they too distracting? Do you have a subplot that could make a better book than the one you’re working on right now? Maybe you need to chuck the old story in the slush pile and try the new shiny subplot instead? You never know.
• Organization – How your story is structured and its size. This can include:
  • Is your story divided into too many chapters or too few?
  • Can readers follow the structure of your story even if you don’t tell it in a linear format?
  • How big is your word count? Is it too big or small for the genre (Fantasy or mainstream fiction) or medium (short story, novella, or novel)?
• Style – This gets into the feel of your story, how you use words, and how your personality is expressed in your work. For example:
  • The length of your sentences. You can write short sentences. It’s all right to write long, long sentences stretching over inch after inch of page space, seemingly making up their own paragraphs in the space of time. You can even write sentences some might call medium in length. But it gets entirely boring when you write an entire short story, never mind novel, with sentences of the same length and structure.
  • What words do you choose to describe a scene or a person? You can’t just use the same words repeatedly, because it becomes as boring as the same sentence lengths. The thesaurus is your friend when it comes to revising.
  • How do you express your personality in how you write? That can filter into anything from your subject matter, the dialogue of your characters, or (like the Hong Kong film director John Woo) you are a fan of action scenes with men wielding twin guns and leaping through the air in rooms filled with doves.

It absolutely does not involve editing: Basically, all the mechanics, grammar, and formatting. That comes in Step 4.

That’s enough of the basics to get you thinking. Next time, I’ll start discussing some of techniques and procedures I’ve used on my own work, especially during the past several years. Even if they might not work for you, maybe they will give you some ideas for your own revisions.

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While I do appreciate you following this blog, I really would like you to subscribe to my Substack page. By subscribing to that page, you’ll not only be receiving my Substack newsletter, The Writing Life With Jason Liegois (the companion blog to this one), but you’ll also be signing up for my email list. Just click the button below.