Revising: Why You May Need to Re-Vision Your Story

A grade school photo
of my Dad

Round and round she goes! Where she stops, nobody knows!

Lately it feels like whenever I start a new piece, I’m spinning the writing roulette wheel. I start out thinking that I am writing a picture book. But then it turns into something else. I was in the middle of baking a cake when an idea popped into my head. I’ve been contemplating writing about triplets since we have triplets in my husband’s family and a friend has three sets of triplet grandchildren.

There are, apparently, very few children’s books that feature triplets. Most sibling sets in literature are twins. And according to my friend, that’s a pity. Keeping track of triplets is almost impossible so triplets would make really fun characters.

So I roughed out my picture book, complete with a fun chorus that is repeated throughout the text. It didn’t quite work so I took it to my critique group. It turns out that my manuscript was too minimalist but they gave me a number of helpful suggestions.

The first thing I did was deepen my characterization. Each of my agents of chaos needed a distinct personality. Unfortunately, as I made these and other changes necessary to a better story, the picture book manuscript got worse, not better. It was just too busy for a clean picture book manuscript.

If only I could write it as a graphic novel.

Wait a minute. Why can’t I? If it works as a graphic novel, it just might be a graphic novel. For those of you who have never written a graphic novel, the manuscript looks more like a script than a straight up manuscript. This meant that changing it from a picture book to a graphic novel meant a steep learning curve for this writer but it was worth it. I feel like it is finally coming together.

Dad is the one hating that suit.

But this isn’t the only time this has happened to me lately. Last week, my dad, who has dementia, had to be admitted to the hospital through the ER. After spending 12 hours in the ER of one hospital, an ambulance had to move him to another hospital. And they forgot his clothes. Let’s just say the day was a snafu of epic proportions. To process it, I roughed out an essay.

Not bad, I thought, but not right either. It was obvious that to keep it from being maudlin I needed to ramp up the humor. But that wasn’t the only problem. To understand his attempts to make a break for it and so many other parts of the day, you have to know Dad. And me. And our whole wacky family.

The rough essay was already 2000 words. This meant that once I work in his four year-old free climb up the mountain, his father dragging disobedient boys into the mine, a pressure cooker accident that involved a jammed up pinto bean, and stories about Dad as a parent to a finicky little girl – that would be me . . . I can’t even guess how long it would be because the more I think about it the more stories relate to that day in the ER.

Sure, I could try to mash it all into one essay but the topics feel far too scattered. Heaven help me, this sounds more like a book-length family memoir than an essay. 

My words of advice to my fellow writers? The next time you are trying to write something new and it just won’t work, maybe you need to do more than a simple rewrite. Maybe what you really need to do is re-vision it.

The problem may not be in the story itself. It might be that you are trying to use the wrong story telling form for this particular story.

--SueBE

To find out more about Sue Bradford Edwards' writing, visit her blog, One Writer's Journey.  Sue is also the instructor for Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults. The next session begins May 20th, 2019.