Tag: Writing About Writing

On Prewriting, Part 2

The Writing Lab, 20 September 2025

Hello! Hope everyone is having a great weekend. It’s once again time for The Writing Lab, where I try and share some insights from writing that I’ve developed from writing, both for pay and for fun, for the past thirty years or so.

It was last month that I began discussing one of the first steps of the writing process – prewriting, where you first generate and develop your ideas, as well as plan out how it will be organized.

With this piece, let’s continue this talk about prewriting by concentrating one of the essential parts of the prewriting process: generating and developing premises for stories. I’ll discuss some ideas about how you might wish to approach this process, using some of my own experiences and processes as examples1.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. You likely will just need to sprinkle some research over it, lol2.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.

On Prewriting, Part 2: Developing your initial premise

It’s somewhat strange to me I often don’t get the question “where do you get your ideas?” It might be because I haven’t been putting my fiction out in public that much until recent years, so I haven’t had the opportunity to get tired of those questions as maybe those who have been in the game longer.

As I mentioned earlier, this part of the advice comes from my experience, which might be much different from yours. Creativity, by nature, if you’re really using it properly3, is a very individual thing. So, to describe the initial part of my creative process, I want to use a very individual metaphor to describe it. The metaphor I think best describes my own creative process is something I call “The Perpetual Stew.”

rustic hot vegetable stew in clay pot
Photo by Selim Alyz on Pexels.com

Perpetual Stew

Back in the day, they had a lot of names for what I call a perpetual stew: forever soup, hunter’s pot, hunter’s stew, and the like. This would go back to the medieval days when people would have a pot like this above a fire or hearth and cooks or whoever was in charge of such things would continually add food and other ingredients to it over days and weeks and even longer, continually adding in and serving out, like you’d hear about in medieval inns and the like. You’d throw in whatever was around or you could harvest at the time: rabbit, hen, pigeon, maybe some pork if you were lucky, grains of course, and whatever vegetables like leeks, cabbage, and other items to flavor up what was in the pot.

Something similar to this is cooking in my head constantly. I end up dumping in whatever I mentally consume, or perhaps gather, into this mental perpetual stew. And I mean everything.

If you don’t know, I have a vast amount of interests and things I learned about during my life. Earlier when I was a kid, I’d dump the whole lore of Star Wars and my love of space Legos in the pot. Over the years, I would add ancient and medieval history and architecture, chess and game theory, 20th century history and culture, the history of 1980’s and 1990’s indie rock in America, professional wrestling throughout the world, bad movies from America, India, and Africa, military tactics and history, 20th century journalism, years of reporting from newspapers and websites, current events, foreign cultures of all kinds, and of course the fiction from 400 to 500 years of Western civilization and beyond. This is among other things, of course.

Eventually, I started to ladle out some servings from this perpetual stew and use it to create some artistic meals. Long ago and back when I was a kid, I took some of those images of Star Wars and the space Legos I played with as a kid and and use it to cook up a sci-fi fantasy space opera long lost to the vagaraties of time and idle thinking. Then there were a few young adult novels, personal obsessions, and teenage-scenarios that got turned into my first manuscript and the one book that got produced as a result of the now defunct National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo). I’m not sure those books will see the light of day because they would need some rewrites and it would be like pretending I was twenty or thirty years old when I was in fact twenty years older. It’s like another person altogether wrote those two books45.

Of course, simply pulling out ingredients from the stew and slopping them together on a plate or in a bowl doesn’t quite work. What I’ve found has worked is when I ask myself questions about what is in the stew or what I want out of it. I’ve found asking these questions helps focus the premises or hooks of my stories clearly enough that it provides at least the skeleton of my tale before I begin drafting.

Asking Questions

question marks on paper crafts
Photo by Leeloo The First on Pexels.com

I’ll give you two examples from my own creative experience. Back in college when I was studying journalism, I learned about an incident that happened at the New York Post in the early 1990’s where the newspaper’s staff was up in arms about the possibility of a shady parking lot mogul buying the paper. Eventually, the paper ran an entire edition about this person, making it clear the staff were not interested in having him for a boss. The incident ended up scaring this buyer off of buying the Post, although the paper eventually wound up in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, which I don’t think was an upgrade.

That story sat in my perpetual stew for a while when one day, I took it out, so to speak, and began asking whether it might be a good basis for a story I’d long wanted to write about the journalism field. That’s when I began asking questions, in the process adding some new ingredients to the new creative meal.

  • What if we set the story in the more familiar location (for me) of Chicago?
  • What if it was set at a declining major newspaper?
  • What if it was happening right during the 2008 presidential elections and the start of the Great Recession, with financial institutions collapsing all around?
  • What if the events of this journalistic revolt ended up with the founding of an American-created, journalistic-focused Wikileaks?

I blended the ideas together, and soon enough, I was writing my debut novel, The Holy Fool. Much more needed to be done in the prewriting, but those questions solidified the premise and much of the action of the story.

More recently, I asked the question, What would my main character and his news organization be doing right around now, in today’s world? And just like that, I had a sequel on my hands.

For my series The Yank Striker, I had my fandom of the sport of soccer and an affection for the Americans who dared to make the sport their profession. It stayed cooking for a while as I gradually added more knowledge of the world of professional soccer in Europe and the US. One day, I had a question:

  • When we finally have an American who can play as well as Lionel Messi, who might that person be? Then I asked:
    • Who would he be?
    • What’s his background?
    • What type of personality would he need to be a true sport superstar (spoiler, a bit obsessed)?

By the end of those questions, I had my main character and the bare frame of what became The Yank Striker series.

Of course, after asking these questions, you still will likely have a long way to go before being finished with the prewriting process. However, you will have a good idea of both the nature of your story, your premise and/or hook, and what you need to find out before drafting out the story.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

Next month, we’ll get into developing your characters. Every reader is a person, and people are naturally drawn to interesting people in fiction. We’ll discuss what you might need in a main character, as well as supporting characters as well, as well as how they can drive your story as well.

Until then, take care.

-30-

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.

Subscribe to my Substack here.
  1. As with all pieces of advice I give here, if you have a better or more effective way of doing some of the things I discuss here, absolutely feel free to stick with your systems. Better yet, message me or share them in the comments so I can “borrow” them. 😅 ↩︎
  2. A piece on proper research will definitely have to be a selection for a future Writing Lab piece in this series. Feel free to make any other topic suggestions for a Writing Lab piece in the comments. ↩︎
  3. That means not using AI to write your bloody stories. What’s the point of creativity otherwise? #ButlerianJihad ↩︎
  4. It might be worth another (or rewritten, depending on how much I’ve discussed the entire story before) Writer’s Biography entry to get into the ins and outs of how it all turned out and why I likely wouldn’t consider trying to release them. ↩︎
  5. Or now that I think about it, maybe I’d release them as web-exclusive stories? Why not make use of stuff I created, even if it’s in a throwaway manner? Why not, indeed, as long as I add the caveat that a kid wrote these books and not the current adult version of me? ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 16 August 2025: On Prewriting, Part 1

photo of pen on top of notebook

Hello everyone out on the Internets. It’s Writing Lab time.

It’s the week I take anything I’ve learned from my thirty or so years working around writing and messing with fiction in my spare time so I can share it with you, my readers.

For the past several editions of this writing lab, I’ve discussed the concept of revision and how it both fits in to the greater writing process and how it can drive your writing. So, I’ve decided to change topics and get into the first part of the writing process – prewriting. Today, I’m going to introduce the topic and get into some of the basic elements of this first part of the writing process.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE:] While the advice I give here is geared mostly toward fiction writing, it can easily be applied to nonfiction as well. Frankly, I’ve done enough nonfiction writing in my day professions (journalism and teaching) to limit my nonfiction writing to these blogs.

A representation of the whole writing process. Note how prewriting is at the start of the process.
man and photos on brown corkboard
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

On Prewriting, Part 1: The Basics

The term “prewriting” can be confusing because it implies no writing takes place in this part of the process. This is not the case, although the “writing,” depending on your process, can include a couple lines of scribbled notes or more substancial text. Regardless, since this takes place before you start assembling your rough draft, prewriting makes sense as a term.

In the simplest of terms, prewriting is the process where you formulate and develop the ideas and story you want to write about. This involves creating the characters of your story, especially the main one, establishing the plot and setting of the story, and whatever research you need to complete to make the story seem believable and grounded.

Again, I am just going to review some of the items I believe are essential parts or elements of the prewriting process. My intent is to go into them in far more detail in subsequent Writing Lab posts.

  • Premise: What is the driving idea/what if question/situation that sets off your story? As an ex-reporter, I’m always a believer in the right questions giving insights you wouldn’t expect.
  • Characters: What is needed to create compelling characters? What do you need in a main character (MC) to make them someone a reader wants to invest their time in. How much information is needed for a fully realized MC? By comparison, how much do you need to flesh out supporting characters? Also, do you really need a human antagonist, or is there another solution to this?
  • Plot: What is going to be the storyline of your tale? Is it going to be a conventional three-act story line, or something matching The Hero’s Journey? Or is it going to be something non-linear and unexpected? Is there a good reason for this?
    • This is where some writers divide themselves into “planners” and “pantsers” when it comes to planning, especially in the area of plot. Basically, planners like to sketch things out in advance, where pantsers tend to just start writing immediately after minimal (if any) preparation. I am more of the former than the latter type of writer, but we’ll get into the differences in more detail later.
  • Setting: When and where is your story taking place? For most writers, time might be a straightforward concept, although again you might want to experiment with a more non-linear concept.
    • Place can become more complicated, especially if you choose a setting you, your audience, or possibly both do not have much experience with or connection to. This gets into the whole concept of worldbuilding – constructing both the physical aspects of your world, as well as the non-tangible elements, such as its society and culture (or multiple societies and cultures).
  • Research, which is any self-education you feel you need to be able to tell a realistic story. I always think you need some level of research for any fictional project, whether it involves things you have already learned over the course of your life or it’s new information you need. Even in a story that might seem familiar enough you would not have need additional knowledge, some additional searching can become vital.

The one thing to keep in mind, as with all my writing advice, is that you should proceed with prewriting in whichever way works best for you.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

On the next writing lab, I’ll get into some of how my own prewriting process works, and one of the most common questions any author gets: “Where do you get your ideas?”

And I know I promised you this before, but I’ll come through next time – there’ll be some stew involved.

-30-

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.

Subscribe to my Substack here.

The Writing Lab, 19 July 2025: On Revising, Part 5

Hello all out there on Substack, WordPress, or in the various nooks and crannies of the Internet. It’s Writing Lab time again.

This is where I try to take some of the hard-earned skills and experiences I’ve picked up from (checking the calendar) nearly thirty years of working in writing or writing-adjacent fields (first journalism, then teaching, then back to journalism for a hot second, and now back to teaching for a while now), as well as my experiences with blogging and fiction writing1.

For this week’s edition, I’m going to take one more look at the art and practice of revision. I believe revising might be the most important part of the writing process, because it’s there raw ideas and stories get crafted into coherent and compelling ones.

To recap how this particular series has progressed, I began with a quick review of revising and how it fits in with the broader writing process, and then I elaborated on this with a broad overview of my own revising process and how it works for me.

Then I discussed word count. While it’s always a good idea to try to write as much as possible, not every single word needs to be in the final version of your creation. I’ve got a new saying: You don’t need to get the last word with yourself. And then, I briefly touched on the element of collaborating with others, both in the revision process and writing in general.

So, for this installment, which will be the last in the revision series for now, will be about the concept of raising the stakes of your story2. We’re going to talk about how to get readers to care more about the story you are trying to tell, and how to make that story more compelling.

On Revising, Part 5 of 5 (for now): Raising the Stakes

playing card and poker chips and dices
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I remember I was in the middle of my initial revisions for the book that would become The Yank Striker when I had a conversation with one of my close acquaintances about the book. At a certain point in the revision process, I always wanted to take a look at everything about my story and see if there is anything structurally the matter with the piece. Are my characters (especially the MC) compelling? Does the story flow? Does my plot have any leaks or dead ends?

So, I showed it to my friend Misty Urban, who happens to be a quite good author of contemporary fiction and historical romance, and she gave me some very insightful comments.

There’s a type of critique that really puffs you up and there’s a type of critique that pulls you down, pulls you down so hard it either breaks your will or you totally disregard it. The critique I got was a third kind – the kind that excites you with the possibilities that you didn’t see before. It’s the type of critique that shines a light onto something you didn’t realize and lights the way to a better story.

There was a lot to it, but the essential part of the critique was this (I’m paraphrasing here): “Well, it’s all good to have an interesting character going through interesting experiences. But it’s not like he’s in danger of losing, is there? Not the way you have it written. The way you have it written, I know he’s always going to succeed. There’s not the suspense there, is there?”

It was then that I realized:

I needed to raise the stakes in my novel.

Let me try to explain this a little.

One of the deadliest things that a beta reader, or any reader, really, can say about a book is, “Well, who cares?” If you want readers to care about your story, you have to make that story involve struggle.

If I was going to define what stakes were, I would lay it out like this. What does your main character (MC) have to gain if they succeed? What do they have to lose if they don’t? Are they the type of things that other readers could relate to, even if they don’t find themselves in the same situations as those characters? Could they relate to them, at least?

The problem was, my MC was always winning. Even that’s all right, but I have to make sure that it’s tough for them. There has to be doubt in the readers’ minds that your character is going to succeed and some consideration of where the character is going to be if they fail.

Essentially, the premise of my book is, what would an American version of Diego Maradona or Lionel Messi look like? What would that person’s path be to soccer glory, and what would they have to overcome to make that happen?

In reading over Misty’s comments, I realized that I had dedicated most of my time to ensuring that my MC would reach those heights and not enough time putting obstacles in his path. For example, Diego had to overcome poverty, and Lionel had to overcome hormone deficiency to become the soccer gods they eventually became.

What did my character have to overcome to reach his goals, especially as a 17-18 year old kid starting to learn about life and what it takes to succeed? I had to show more of the building and less of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, essentially. I had to show the struggle, the climb to the top, to make sure that people cared about what happened to my MC.

I have to credit Donald Maass and his book Writing the Breakout Novel for educating me on the concept of raising the stakes in fiction. Those stakes I’m talking about mean simply: what is there to lose if the main character or characters fail in their efforts? These stakes have to be both public (affecting society or the greater public) and personal (affecting the main characters). In the case of public stakes, you always want to ask yourself if these public stakes are believable, or something that could be a plausible danger if the author gives sufficient detail. Personal stakes depend on making your reader relate to or even sympathize with your MC and their struggles. As the story goes on, you have to continue to ask yourself how things could get worse in the case of the public stakes, and how the personal stakes could matter more to the reader. And you should make sure things get tougher for your characters as time goes on.

Next Time at The Writing Lab:

On the next writing lab, I’m going to start getting into the creative process and prewriting ideas in particular. I’ll discuss a bit of my process on developing and fleshing out ideas. Also, stew will be involved.

-30-

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.

Subscribe to my Substack here.
  1. Even though I also write poetry, it’s an art I’ve picked up relatively late, so I’m seeking advice rather than giving it. soccer will be used a bit interchangeably to describe the same game both here and in the book. Those are the breaks, as they say. ↩︎
  2. Unlike with the previous entries in this series, this one is certainly fiction-centered. ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 21 June 2025: On Revising, Part 4

close up photography of eyeglasses near crumpled papers

Hello everyone who has somehow happened onto this electronic page, either through a friendly email or the whims of the mighty algorithms, or by some random twist fo fate. Welcome to The Writing Life.

Since it is once again the third weekend of the month, I am bringing you another edition of The Writing Lab. As I get older, I become painfully aware of how much I don’t know about the world and what I might never know. However, since I’ve had twenty-five-plus years of experience with the art of writing, as a journalist, teacher, fiction writer, and fledgling poet, I am at least slightly comfortable in saying I might have some knowledge of the art.

Since I started The Writing Lab back in March, I have fixated on the topic of revising. It turns out I’ve had a bit to say about it, one of the steps in the larger writing process. In all honesty, I’m of the opinion revision is the most important part of the writing process, because I see it at the step where your writing, especially your fiction writing, gets crafted into something both coherent and compelling1.

We began with a quick review of revising and an explanation of how it fits into the writing process. I continued the following month with a broad overview of my own revising process and its basic workings.

I then touched on the topic of word count. Many writers, and I include myself in this category, see the more you write, the better it is for your creativity and productivity as well. However, what you learn in the revising process is the more you write, the more difficult it is to search through the word salad and find a clear and compelling story. You need to learn you don’t need to focus on getting the last word with yourself. I talked about it in detail before.

So, for this next installment, I want to discuss something perhaps not as discussed in writing columns—the idea of collaboration in writing, especially when it comes to the concept of beta readers. As I am still in the process of prepping my book The Yank Striker’s Journey for publication, this issue is still fresh in my mind.

corrections on a paragraph written on a paper
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

On Revising, Part 4 (of ?): On the subject of writing collaboration and beta readers

In the realm of art, one of the questions is how much it is an inherently individual effort and how much it is a inherently collaborative effort. This can depend on the type of medium the artist works in. For example, musicians and film directors can find their creative processes involve interacting with and creating alongside many different people. For novelists and painters, however, it can be a far more individual journey—one man, woman, or being staring at a blank page or a blank canvas until a certain amount of inspiration strikes.

However, such categories obscure creative realities. In the realms of film and music, for instance, one person with a clear artistic vision, maybe a singer, guitarist, or producer, or a director or actor, can dominate above others’ visions. Also, those who are writers or painters can end up relying on outsiders far more than what immediately becomes apparent.

It is regarding the latter phenomenon we will review today. As a young man, I considered writing to be a one-man band situation. I created my worlds, I wrote them down on paper (or electronic files) and then released them into the wider world. However, I’ve come to realize the wisdom of former US President Barack Obama when he said during a 13 July 2012 campaign speech:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.

In this instance, Obama was not trying to downplay the efforts of entrepreneurs and their creativity. What he was trying to say was there were plenty of people behind those successful entrepreneurs which helped them to get to where they needed to be. They had a support system to reach their goals.

With this in mind, writers do not get to be a success just based on their own skills and talents. They have to rely in part on the efforts of others to see their creative efforts develop into their optimal form. The intent behind this post is to detail how this idea of collaboration fits into the revision portion of the writing process in particular and their creative process of novels in general.

Again, the cliche of the fiction writer is someone striking out on their own on a creative standpoint, without the input or responsibility of collaborators, financial backers, and the like. For example, it’s not a coincidence that George R.R. Martin first started writing his A Song Of Ice And Fire series after being frustrated with the technical and financial limitations television had put on his ideas as a Hollywood screenwriter, ironic since that series would inspire one of the most expensive television programs in history. 🙂

Being your own boss as a fiction writer has tons of advantages. You don’t get into any arguments over whether a character or plot twist makes sense, or whether your story should be set in Los Angeles rather than an undersea colony, for example. You set your own deadlines, as well as the size of your work (within reason unless you are willing to pay to get it published). All of this is true.

When it comes to revisions, however, I do have a rule of thumb.

Any man can be his own editor, but they can never be their only editor.

One area where collaborative effort can play a significant and absolutely necessary part in writing is during the revision process. Whether you call them peer reviewers, first readers, or, as is now the fashion, beta readers, having another set of eyes to read what you’ve written can be the difference between an OK revision and a great one. Why is this? Simply put: you as a writer are not going to be able to find every plot point not wrapped up, every unrealistic characterization, and every unfinished scene, not to mention every misspelled word. You don’t need a village to write a book, but I think you do need more than one set of eyes to revise it.

Where do you find these beta readers? Unfortunately, most of us don’t happen to live in the household of Stephen King, which wound up producing four different published authors. So, you have to look around. I’m lucky enough to have a local writing group that I participate in. This next month, I’m actually hoping that some of them will do me the honor of reading my latest WIP. There are many online groups that have people willing to look at WIP’s, although the quality of this help can vary. I’d recommend developing acquaintances with members online before asking them to beta read. Sometimes you can be lucky enough to get a professional critique; however, I wouldn’t spend a massive amount of money doing this.

As far as when in the revising process this should take place, I would say it should happen before you seriously consider adding and/or subtracting major portions of your manuscript. By that, I mean the heavy lifting. Whatever form it takes, having more than just your eyes and viewpoint revising your work is key to making sure you don’t leave anything needed out and that you don’t keep anything that you don’t need. After a certain point in the revising process, you don’t want to make massive changes to your work, so it’s best to get this feedback early so you are more open to it.

Of course, there are many other ways people can collaborate with you in the writing process. I think a proofreader is massively important if you want to make your manuscript look professional. Most of the time, this just covers grammatical and conventions issues, but it can also cover some light revisions as well. It made a big difference with my work.

While I left the design of my first two books up to my publisher, I went to an outside designer for The Yank Striker’s Journey. It certainly cost me more than either just leaving it to my publisher or trying to rough out something myself on Canva, but I believe the results were well worth it.

There are some other professionals, such as marketing experts, who might also be of assistance for writers. All I can advise on this matter is to choose carefully. There are many people out online who say they can help you, but I’d take plenty of time to research them. As this world gets more digital, I find myself relying more on people I’ve had personal relationships with rather than wholly online. In the end, I think you should consider collaborating with people who can add something to your product you wouldn’t be able to accomplish as effectively on your own.

On the next writing lab, I’ll discuss another aspect of revising. I think I might have at least two more editions of this topic before having to consider another aspect of writing.

I’m going to be out of town Saturday for a book fair event, so I’m not even going to try and coordinate a live chat or Substack Note. However, if you have any questions about the article, had questions about fiction, poetry, or essay writing, or you wanted to get some advice on something you are trying to create, reach out to me either in the comments of this post or directly through Substack DMs. The links for both of them are below.

Hope I see you around.

-30-

Advertisements

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.

Subscribe to my Substack here.
  1. Most of this advice is aimed at fiction writers rather than nonfiction writers or those who write poetry verse, but I believe the vast majority of it applies to you just as much to those who write fiction. ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 17 May 2025: On Revising, Part 3

rewrite edit text on a typewriter

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

Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com

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.

-30-

Advertisements

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.

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

The Writing Lab, 19 April 2025: On Revising, Part 2

marking a composition page with sticker

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

Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com

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.

-30-

Advertisements

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.

Subscribe to my Substack here.
  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. ↩︎

The Writing Lab, 15 March 2025: A new feature

gold quill pen

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

black text on gray background
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

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.

-30-

Advertisements

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.

Subscribe to my Substack here.

Poetry Night at The Writing Life, 23 December 2023

Subscribe to continue reading

Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.