If it's important to have a plan for drafting your story, it's certainly important to have a plan for revision. Solid revision transforms unfinished work by giving it levels or depths it didn't have before, smoothing it out, and producing a polished product. Before you dive into the revising stage, I think it's important to consider some general revision strategies. What is revision all about, and how do you go about it?

What is Revising?

Revision is overhaul—partial or total. Revision is about tearing down walls and ripping up floorboards. It's not about changing light fixtures to make the place look a little more presentable or spiffy. Real revision digs below the surface of the work to seek out possible depths that might give the story complex meanings and to further explore and refine these deep structures.

Working with lasting value calls for some interpretation on your reader's part; it poses questions—questions that have no easy answers. The point of revision is to make your story as complex and integrated in all its parts as possible, and yet to keep it as lively as possible—to keep intact its imaginative power. This, of course, is no easy task, but it's well worth the effort. When you revise, you should do the five basic things:

1. Make Sure Your Work Is Complete

Is anything missing? This question leads to questions like these:

• Is your protagonist's overall arc convincing, or does it require more development?

• Does the end of the story come too quickly?

• Do some scenes need more development?

• Do some subplots in your novel need more fleshing out?

• Could more be done with secondary characters?

• Could some themes in your story be given more attention?

It may take several readings of your draft to be sure it's complete. An outline, especially a detailed one, will probably serve you well here as a blueprint. Yet the question of completeness may also come down to a non rational or intuitive sense that this story "feels done." It's not too short, nor is it overlong.

What's the right amount? When fiction is working, it's working because it bears the fullness of life. The course has been run. The distance covered. We're at the finish line. Or, to change the metaphor: We want no more—the meal's over—we're satisfied.

But that ending... what to do? There's, of course, plenty of room for creativity in terms of the final closure. You will have to decide on the right ending for your work.

2. Develop a More Complex Work

Range and Depth of Character

Protagonists should be "round," not "flat," and "dynamic," not "static." This means they are complex and have range as well as depth. But what is the benchmark of complexity or depth? How can you know where to draw the line between round and flat, dynamic and static? Certainly, this is an important question to consider as you revise your manuscript. I will speak about characterization generally here, as all of Section V covers this in more depth.

A complex character resists easy summation. You can list her personality attributes, attitudes, beliefs, typical behaviors, and quirks, but something about her surpasses all of these things. Like people in real life, a complex character isn't predictable or cookie-cutter and may even have contradictory impulses. She is not a stereotype.

This doesn't mean that you set out to create characters so contradictory that no explanation is possible. However, it's important as you revise to look for ways to develop more complexity in your character and to let your imagination take a second run to keep her from being pigeonholed.

Strong character conflict is crucial to creating a character with depth. An untested character is merely a sketch or portrait. When a character faces a conflict that truly matters, one in which the stakes are high enough that failure or success will affect his life in a fairly significant way, he comes interesting to the reader. His motivations for action or nonaction must be believable and convincing. With depth comes energy and vitality, and both are essential to good fiction.

A word about secondary characters: They don't need a lot of depth, but they must nonetheless ring true. Populating your story with secondary characters that are mere stereotypes or props will maim your main characters. After all, main characters play off secondary characters.

Secondary characters must contribute to the energy of the main characters in some way. An exception might be a ridiculous, one-dimensional secondary character who becomes an interesting foil for your main character. But as a general rule, keep this in mind: If secondary characters are plain dull without an underlying benefit—say, a comic effect—their contact and dialogue with the main character could affect this character in a negative way.

Range and Depth of Ideas

Any number of human issues come up in fiction: the condition of being human, the challenges to human happiness, and the compromises people make. All of these are important issues.

As you revise, avoid clichéd treatments of such issues, obvious conventions, and the hackneyed. Your first draft—unless your imagination has truly been charged and has led to some real surprises—will include some clichés. The whole draft, alas, might be one big cliché—don't be alarmed. Clichés can be freshened up.

Now it's time to rethink, re-experience, tackle the draft with new energy, and uncap something new. Read the story over carefully, and give your imagination another chance to have at it. To escape clichés, you must peer more deeply into your characters and their issues, going for as much complexity as you can. Again, this means deep-structure revision. Read more about clichés in the third section of this guidebook, Plot.

3. Work on Overall Focus

Writing a novel must have sharp focus, though how this focus is achieved certainly varies from work to work. Issues of focus naturally arise in the handling of plot and structure or the order of story parts. Plot-wise, does the story include extraneous material that sidetracks the reader? Structure-wise, are the story parts organized to achieve the desired effect? Or does the work feel scattershot? Be prepared as you revise your story to determine what is needed, what isn't, and where it should go structurally to create the best effect.

Basic Plot

A plot can lack clear focus if too many conflicts are included. If the plot is over complicated, the reader might miss the main conflicts. As you revise your manuscript, look for places to keep the key conflicts in the forefront of your reader's attention. If the cause-effect relation between various conflicts isn't clear—if the story doesn't advance clearly from A to B to C—the reader may become confused and the work will seem diffuse.

I don't mean to say you should aim to make the work overly obvious. You can keep the reader guessing, but by the end of a short story, the reader should be able to separate the main conflicts from the minor ones—and by the end of a novel, the reader should be able to separate the main plot from the subplot or subplots.

Also, don't clutter your work. The key is to find the heart of your story and dump what doesn't pertain. Ask yourself this: Does this material belong, or does it take the work off course? This is, of course, a judgment call.

Structure

Certainly, you will need to decide on the order of story parts: summary, flashback, scene, exposition, and description. Which should go first, second, third, and so on? Do as much as you can to avoid a scattered effect.

Sometimes flashbacks cause readers to lose focus, especially if the flashback is too long.

A long summary or long expository section can have the same effect if the momentum of the story is lost because the key conflict is delayed.

Make note of such issues as you revise. Determine the key conflict and decide on the best way to organize your story to achieve the greatest impact.

4. Work on Appropriateness and Effectiveness

The issue of appropriateness comes up in regard to both point-of-view (POV) and style. Does this POV deliver the right effect: an interesting plot and ideas, a compelling effect on the reader? Is the style appropriate for your protagonist, for this story? Does it enhance or does it detract?

Rethinking Point-of-View

When considering or reconsidering POV, you must address two separate issues. This might be familiar to you if you've read the Point-of-View (POV) and Rethinking POV parts of Section VI Point-of-View in this guidebook.

One issue is the vantage point of the story: Is this character the right lens or filter for this story? Or should the story be told from a different character's POV?

A second issue has to do with narrative mode. Should your story be told in first-, second-, or third-person? To rethink POV, you must also consider what each narrative POV can deliver. Remember, first-person gives immediacy and intimacy, especially with I-narrators who are particularly self-reflexive. Third-person limited establishes more narrative distance from the character, and third-person omniscient establishes even more distance.

Deciding on the right vantage point and the right narrative mode is important to any substantive revision. Even if you feel pretty confident about POV, you should reconsider both aspects as you set out to revise your manuscript.

If you decide to revise POV, you will certainly have some work ahead of you, especially with a novel. As I indicated in the POV section, it's not merely a matter of changing "I" to "he" or "she." If you move from an I-narrator to a third-person limited POV, you now have much more narrative distance in your story. The intimate "I" is no longer speaking directly to us. Instead, the story has an authorial voice: a persona created by you, the author.

Such a revision means rethinking the emotional feel of the character. If can be very transformative and can give the story a completely different sound. If you have more than one protagonist and you shift from multiple first-person narrators to omniscient, or from omniscient to multiple first-person narrators, the revision will likely be even more extensive—and again, the sound of the work will undoubtedly change.

Rethinking Style

Style is the manner of expression, and it's closely connected to voice. A first draft will undoubtedly require considerable attention to style. Consider whether the dialogue needs to be more hurried and clipped in places, or perhaps the prose should be more lyrical and impassioned. Maybe the exposition seems too formal for this particular character and setting. These are matters of style, and attending to them can sometimes mean a major overhaul.

How do you determine what is appropriate? It comes down to questions about the character, plot, and key ideas of the story. Does your story's style seem fitting? Is it at odds with the narrative in any way? Is the tone off?

To find the right style you must be willing to experiment with language. What feels right? What feels wrong? Should your style be informal and stripped of most detail? Or should it be formal in diction and rich with detail?

Your narrative POV may become a stylistic consideration as well. As you work on style, you will have to fit prose style with narrative POV. The two will work hand-in-hand to create a certain voice. Together, they will affect the tone of the work.

5. Make Your Story a Lively Work of the Imagination

By lively, I mean inspired. The work may be quite sober or heartrending, but it remains a lively work because the imagination energizes it at every level.

If this is the case in your first draft, you should be highly thankful; maybe you're great at first drafts because you just let things happen and don't block your imagination with too much naysaying.

It's possible that as you rework your manuscript with reason as your guide, you will lose some of that imaginative power. If you feel this is happening, you must return to first draft activities, keeping in mind that you must do everything to avoid turning the story into something that is "perfect" but is dead as dust.

And how do you do that? On the one hand, you recognize the value of your novel plan, synopsis, or outline, but, on the other hand, you understand that art isn't bound by the rules of reason or logic. It has a sort of logic to it, sure, but art surprasses logic.

There is that spirit in it, that breath of human life—that being infused in the very interstices of the story—that resists a verbal summing up. This is what you go for—that pulse of life.

And when the reader cannot feel that, the work is dead. The work may be competently written. It may answer to the dictates of sound conclusion, but who cares? Is it breathing? Are the characters? Are the words? Are the ideas?

Author of "Write and Revise for Publication," Jack Smith offers the following advice:

• Dig more deeply into the felt life of the characters and the world they inhabit. Feel them and picture them.

• Find your voice in the material. This isn't easy, but take a second of your work where the voice sounds like you are in control of the material—where you have an air of authority. Find that same voice, a voice you want to listen to.

• Read a great novel, one that has that breath of human life, and try to discover how the author does it. It's important to read the whole book because you want to find out how this voice is sustained from section to section.

Feedback

Once you have your basic story down and have done some polishing, it's a good idea to get feedback from other writers—i.e., Wattpad. You can make it clear that you still need to improve certain things and do some fine-tuning, but that you'd like some help on the major elements: the characters, the plot, the basic thrust of the story—whether these seem too stale or clichéd.

You can ask if the opening draws readers in. You can also get short-term feedback on your prose style and your handling of dialogue—in selected places—just to see what readers are thinking.

Feedback is important, but if you don't plan on posting your work to Wattpad, it's best to get feedback from several people, not just one or two, and also make sure it comes from writers and not only family and friends.

What do you do, though, when responses vary? Thank those who gave responses, consider all the feedback carefully, and set aside these varied responses for later consideration. When making such decisions, you ultimately go with your own instincts and understanding of the craft.

You can't believe everybody, and you shouldn't. Others will be put off by attitudes inherent in the work and won't focus enough on the craft itself. Some readers simply won't be the right readers for your story. But the main thing is to profit by hearing the ideas of others and making use of what you can.

Please remember to vote!