Took a fantastic four-day writing workshop from Eric Witchey last month. Nearly a dozen of us listening to him expound on writing at high-speed for six hours a day. My head still feels full. I'm still processing and trying to work what I learned into my writing and revision practice.
Eric believes strongly in practicing your writing skills daily -- a minimum of 15 minutes a day just for practice, not on any current work in progress. I don't do that daily, but I've been doing it far more often since the workshop, and it really does help train your brain to write better.
While I was creating a template to help with my daily setup for that, it occurred to me my biggest obstacle has been revision. It's really hard for me to focus on overalls and specific issues -- I tend to slip into making the sentences pretty -- which is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic if the entire scene needs to be cut or doesn't make sense as written. So I've added a daily revision practice as well.
I'm still toying with the setup for it. You can't revise something you haven't written, so it requires I pull out a short story I've started. Thanks to the daily writing practice, I have plenty of unfinished shorts.
First I try to find a core for the story, a reason for telling it. Sometimes that doesn't come until I've done some of the work below.
I look at the characters and jot down what I need to know about them to strengthen the story (which frequently translates into ramping up the conflict), and if their behavior and emotional reactions are realistic, consistent and flow naturally from the events and thoughts given.
I look at characters' emotional arcs and see if they're working properly. If the story isn't finished, or is broken as written, I brainstorm different possible reactions given what I know about the characters, or make notes on what I need to know about them in order to do that brainstorming.
I look at the setting and note what it could contain that would add or what it has that detracts from the story's intent, tone or theme.
That's frequently as far as I can get in 15 minutes, so I'll stop there and jot down any ideas about what the process has brought up for me about the story. Genre ideas, perhaps, or page numbers in Eric's workshop book for exercises I could do that might help the story. Then I go do something else.
Later when I have a number of those partial revisions I'll be able to start alternating that process with picking one of them up to do the actual rewriting. That will need its own setup and I haven't ironed that out yet -- it might vary from story to story.
Daily revision practice is something I'm still tinkering with. So far I like it; I get done with it and the daily writing practice and I am pumped to start on my work in progress. It's too early to see if it will actually help me focus when revising larger works, but it should. I can't expect a capability to just plop into my brain -- every skill requires practice.
