Thanks to the late, great Raymond Federman one of my mentors and friends, whom I worked for/with as a TA for several years, I am addicted to his mandate to do 12 Drafts of all of my works. I wish I could proudly decry him wrong in his estimation that such revision, multiple times, at least 12, would not garner a better work——but sacre bleu!——he was damnably correct.
I’m finishing revisions on one large project, Hush and Puzzle—-both Final Drafts lost in computer Hell so the Final drafts were lost and the wrong file used to create the books themselves. Only after receiving the Proof copies and reading it did we realize what had occurred and shut off the book on Amazon, search for the files, not find them and finally submit to another revisioning.
Then in Hush there are, thanks to the late great Federman inspiration several experimental points in text, layout, etc. that are not possible in the way they were before due to printer issues. So that meant what could have been a few weeks of revisions turned into months because the whole book had to be reformatted.
The problem is, though I teach it to Advanced/Certification level, MS Word has an upper echelon limit of what it is capable of for 250–700 page novels/manuscripts. I’ve slowly been peeking over to InDesign to complement my Premiere TV show editing software subscription but these pre 2021 works have to be revised in Word. That’s a basic layout pain.
But to actual narrative revision, I do find that when I get the Final Proof copy—-I like to think it’s finished. It never is. I set it aside and then in the middle of the night, when it’s sleeping, I attack it—-I attack it like a beast. I tear into the book as if I deeply dislike Kyle, as if he has wronged me, and this is my revenge. Commas, quotation marks, layout, margins are fast slashes but my deepest cuts go into sentences—-maybe and just—-words that I generally delete and delete thousands, I do not even realizing they are my form of textual mitigation.
Then from and form. From always comes out form. It is my special personal dyslexia. And no red lines for correction appear because both are words.
Page Count
How does it effect the amount of pages? Some work, I end up as a stronger editing so I lose pages—-as many as 10–20. In other works I’m furiously scribbling in the marginalia so I can end up with 100–500 more pages which is a major revision; generally again though about 10–50 pages added/lost.
What am I revising? What changes?
In Hush I had a Latina housewife, Jackie who has subsumed herself to her “perfect” handsome husband and his family. I had a good 4–8 pages where I switch POV from him taking their son out for the day and her going back inside to her “world”—-it was a way to get inside of her for the first time, 150 pages into the novel, and she’d been seen mainly through the eyes of her husband, Victor.
I had a mini-chapter within a larger chapter about Victor, exposing Jackie and then ending with Victor and his son not going where he told her they were going, supporting her burgeoning sense of his duplicity.
Read it several times, it was fine, but it also gave sort of short shrift to her—-it’s another 150 pages before she emerges again, pivotal to understanding Victor’s secrets, by her seeking to go back to college and his violent reaction. When I considered her—-most of her narrative internal, observational, purposefully non-communicative with the other half dozen main characters——I thought about her daily life, for these past handful of married years.
I had played with her first section entering in parentheses and italics Jackie's family’s reaction to Victor and their warnings. For every odd observation/realization I added:
(They had warned her, hadn’t they?) What I wanted to do there was reveal Victor on a different level, I had considered that he was sort of invisible to his wife or that she was blinded by his looks, his attention to her. But I didn’t want his mask to be infallible. I started to see her blindness as more voluntary than his ability to hide himself. His son noticed discrepancies, why didn’t Jackie?
Within the novel itself, there are multiple kinds of women—-a young girl with a baby, who has assumed her older (dead) sister’s identity for Welfare; a middle aged caretaker who has never been in love; a former activist-revolutionary who has turned to drugs and alcohol; an old oracle woman; and finally a prostitute/sex trafficker. Lots of differing kinds of women but all present in this building. I needed then to more deeply etch Jackie.
And that’s what revising often is, noticing your theme/pattern, the road of a narrative paved through the novel itself but there are still bushes and thickets and fallen trees on the path so you walk the road of a character and clean it up, clarify intersections, paving hills and valleys better so they’re easier to traverse.
One thing I did with Jackie in her first of 3 pivotal sections (maybe a total of 25 pages of a 700 page novel) was I detailed out her routines, in almost monotonous details. She’s taking care of 6 other people in this apartment so she must have a routine, a system, be organized in some way?
I don’t always write in page/chronological order so I noticed a thread about her cooking, prepping dinner for her and her husband’s family and I pulled at it——and drew it out another thousand words or so—-the shopping, the carrying, the prepping, who liked what, who didn’t like what, who wanted what—-red grapes for the family, green for Victor——spicy food for him, less spicy for them, and on and on, in ways that keep bringing Jackie to a sort of staccato, a march, a repetitive action that fills years and years. In the Draft # 11—-I highlighted this food prep paragraphs in red—-and I liked it.
Then I looked around her life, the apartment, in my mind’s eye, and I copied the same paragraph into 5 more places in her 4–8 page 1st POV section—-and changed the first sentence—-SEX WITH VICTOR, CLEANING THE APARTMENT, HER FAMILY/HIS FAMILY, HAVING A BABY, HER SECRETS. I went through the physical Proof making a thousand more little notes and minor edits and revisions and additions then I came back to the Master File and in one sitting went at these 5 Jackie sections-paragraphs in red on these subjects—-aiming for about a thousand words each within her already complete chapter.
The challenge of doing it within set sections is that one, I have to say, plumb out something new, something interesting, germane and that progresses the chapter, the character and the overall plot. Not exactly a flashback but an inner flash or inner vision, to the text itself. Now you, the reader, and me and even Jackie, see new things, better connections.
Interestingly for awhile, a solid sitting of a good 15–20 minutes—-it’s just Jackie’s novel, about Jackie. I realized so many of the other main characters were strong, got to tell their story and she hadn’t. She hadn’t because she, as a character, and as a forced housewife, is invisible—-so she’d become sort of invisible in the text itself.
Her future rebellion against Victor is now evident in her own personal history and finally the nut of why she married him—-she was on a “roll”. She told Victor she was a virgin but she’d had two lovers beforehand—-and they’d been good men, only minor problems, so she was confident in picking men, lovers. When Victor came along, extremely handsome and interested, she never analyzed him closely====instead she was proud to parade him as the man who’d asked her (a supposed virgin) to marry—-something her mother, sisters and even brothers, hadn’t achieved.
Jackie is competitive and Victor was a prize, unattainable by her family in their relationships—-a good, smart, hardworking, well earning man—-so she couldn’t see anything wrong with him. Or that psychological traits learned in her family would press her to choose a man like Victor, far more similar in dysfunction than not. He always was her norm to unlearn but pride and arrogance got in her way, thinking as the first one in college, she was better than her mother and aunts and sisters and brothers.
I found out about Jackie's arrogance in the revisions.
Now her later shock, devastation and embarrassment makes sense. Fits her.
Handwritten
Yes, I start all of my works, about 80% as handwritten first, in notebooks on pads. It’s generally the first few drafts that I’m working with, carrying all of the time and then typing up.
In Hush what happened was after I printed out the 8 x 11 Draft # 5 or 6, I start doing my grammar, layout and narrative edits—-which I demark with post it notes to appropriate colors.
That then brings me to not just marginalia but a sense of what’s missing or too much—-I’m working toward Drafts 10 to 12 being my final submission Drafts for editing and then publishing. By the time I go through it so many times, a lot of the debris is cleared away.
Then I can have a full book Proof printed out and look at covers, try different ones out. see what works and the physical look of the book itself.
In the multiple Proof drafts what I'm looking for is how the covers “work: in colors to theme of the novel itself. The action happens in an apartment building so I tried out the first, then the old oracle is named Mother Moon and she’s pushing a lot of the characters in the book so I played with her in a motif on the cover—-then there’s a moon motif, a fire and a cleansing and I found a pic of an eclipse, then another of a moon this time playing with the coloring of the moon and making it a full span—-front and back pic.
Inside of each Proof Draft I’m doing more marginalia edits and additions, strengthening scenes, taking some out. My rule in writing is that each scene must progress the book itself, the plot, the characters—-everything is a step—-no pausing, no meandering, no silliness.
In that yes, I do work on climaxes, denouements, beats—-Hush is divided into four seasons but as both weather and allegorical to the characters. Deep Winter, Spring’s Truth, Summer’s Fire and Fall’s Promise—-but then I even go back and revise some of those descriptors to what each “becomes”—-each section, because there are chapters, to a theme, each chapter to a point in time—-then I started playing with time itself in thinking about the denouement, a crescendo, reached in Summer's Fire.
So the chapters themselves become experiments, ascending——1 to 36 Chapter Numbers, as you’re reading along——and passing through the first two seasons/sections and it’s building, conflicts occurring, needs and growth and drama…….. and then like music, like an aria——Chapter 36 holds the note—-so it’s 1 through 34, 35, 36….holddddddddddd 36 again,
Chapter 36
Chapter 36 again
and Chapter 36 again
and Chapter 36 again
and Chapter 36 again—-every character playing out in this 36th Chapter—-multiple/overlapping time signature, seemingly pivotal in the same moment, minutes, days and then like a roller coaster the work itself reaches this apex——-
and drops……..Chapter 36,
35,
34,
33,
32,
31,
30,
a descending Chapter numbering, shorter, shorter, faster, faster chapters until we crash through to Summer’s Fire at about 21, 20, 19 and then all hell breaks loose in the climax, and then the completion into Fall’s Promise—-chapters, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….
and the irony in Chapter 1, the last chapter of the book, of the inversion of the titled section “fall”.
I could not have played with the narrative structure, the layout structure—-some characters bleeding across pages—-another character actually stopping the novel, the universe itself, for a singular purpose, if I hadn’t designed through the previous chapters hints and clues and breaks—-sometimes articles and other book chapters written by Cassandra, the writer from her novels, or letters written by another characters long dead father. A writer writes within my novel and then even inserts her work into my novel and then even stops and rewrites my novel!
Revision is like going to a tailor and getting your suit fit to you, your body===but instead to the character the overall plot.
Part of where I get this from is writing——out of time—-so when the full manuscript went to the editor and one of his notes was that with a large cast I had to clearly delineate the lead protagonist, I went back and handwrote 100+ pages of Boys and Girls (playing with the Prince song and Steven, the character’s omnisexuality) and wrote 100 pages of his life and thoughts and then liberally sprinkled it into the manuscript as paragraphs, new chapters, memories and most importantly, connectors to the other characters.
In order to do that I had to have finished the novel to see where I could expand, cut, thicken, deepen. Revisions, for me, are never linear, in fact they are purposefully “out of time”/sequence.
Every novel, sure as rain, I find one section, add in one super long multi-page piece within another section, that deepens and clarifies a huge section in the novel or the theme of the novel.
Yet Another Novel-Inserted Revisions
Stay With Me
In Stay With Me—-it was when I stopped seeing the woman, Christina in the love triangle as simplistically the villain-virago, and instead wrote 4–5 chapters just about her, thought about her as akin to the poet Anne Sexton—-trying to find poetry within herself, her life.
S
In S, the novel I knew Canaan (his name was originally Kanar but I changed it in revision) was hunting the mother and her 7 daughters from his cult, through time. But in the revision, I found the “Black Church”. By found I mean, my mother having been a pastor, I was able to reach into why they followed Canaan, the power of the Black pulpit, the power and infusion and subsuming of women who have acted as the foundation and girders to the Black Church…and then to a deeper why.
I was able to find the eroticism and sex in the ecclesiastical through Canaan and his sexualized persona-preaching. And in that, the control and liberation of spiritual beliefs, the misogyny towards Black women, and their reactions and interactions to it.
I found that chapter—-where I let him preach to hundreds in like the 10th Draft and then I was able to go back and network the rest of the (short—-200 page) novel to that theme.
It’s under 200 pages because I resisted over-writing, adding in a huge backstory for each adult sister—-instead there’s some, biographical glimpses, who have more than others—-some explained in a few lines, some a chapter, very loose descriptions, I don’t even directly assign astrological signs to them as I have one sister think about their charts. They are in many ways ephemeral and static—-the point is the spiritual/time war, not even completely the participants personally. It’s much, much, much stronger in its’ brevity.
Puzzle
In the revision of Puzzle, the heavy work, I was aiming for a polyphonic narrative—-each “chapter” a designated day—-Monday, Tuesday and so on. Then in the revisions I started experimenting with Today, Tomorrow, Every Day, Any Day, as I found in counter-pointing, yes again like music—-that a Black family and a White family, experienced time differently. Definitely differently from the old Native American man who lives on the mountain, and has mystically intervened twice in their lives.
Finally in completing Hush, I looked at the production line of so many books and wanted to play with absence, using Hush, the word itself as a representation of silence—-but also playing on it being the hymnal Hush, Hush, that is integral to the plot then further to a section titled with Selah—-from the Bibble—-the intentional pause, break, taking of a breath in a recitation.
The book then is like this Selah…Hush in the characters lives——a year when pointed things happen to them.
From that came simplifying the cover as a counterbalance to itself and also to the other books which had faces, were busy, played with the abstract. Hush, as a form of silence, quiet to be represented in an absence of too much imagery. I threw in the cane and veve because they’re both integral and objects, symbols/symbolic.
Revising-Hatred. Yes, It Becomes Tedious in Construction/Reconstruction
So yes, I do a lot to get each project to its’ best expression-presentation and I can honestly tell you there is a point, mid-labor, like giving birth to a child, 12+ times, where I hate it, where I hate the process I’m putting it (me) through BUT…..to Federman’s credit and mentorship—-what I begin with, raw dough, and the potential of eventual spun gold, my own writing distilled to it’s strongest bits and bobs and even covers and layout, is worth it.
#KylePhoenix
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