[MUSIC] Welcome to week six, the end is in sight. Our focus this week is on rewriting and publication. This segment, we're going to talk about revision, revision, revision. You've gotten some more language-specific advice from your readers, it should help give you an idea of the special quirks of your own style, and where it might improve. I hope you will still bear in mind that list from Sofia McManus are those chatting or thinking words that get on the page very quickly and can come out without any expense to the story as a whole. You've given critiques and learned how to look for language level issues that can really break open a piece and make it flourish. Think of what you saw in your fellow fellow's work and be frank with yourself about maybe whether you're falling prey to some of the same mistakes. Are you using a lot of the passive voice? Are you relying on being verbs, for example. One thing that I think it's important to look at as you're looking at the language specifically is to try and locate the action in the world rather than in the mind. Here's what I mean by that. Consider the difference between he thought about the cat falling out of the tree and the cat fell out of the tree. The key difference there is in the verb. The verb in the first sentence is thought, the verb in the second sentence is fell. When you give the sentence in the second version you are making part of a dramatization. You're making part of a scene. When you give it in the first version you're locating the action in the mind where nothing really happens. You just find a person thinking about it. Likewise, locate the action in the world rather than in the faculties of perception. So for example, if you are writing very consistently one character's point of view, it's superfluous to say he saw the cat fall out of the tree. When you can just say the cat fell out of the tree. That's an actual vivid action scene. The more you can comb those verbs of perception ad thought, those places where you say the character remembered or wondered and just go directly to the thing that happened. Later in this sentence you're going to be more and more and more in applied action based story. You've got two more weeks to put your story into its final shape. After that you'll get one more round of critics, an evaluation, from three of your peers about the final product and what it's all meant to them. Let's talk for a minute about a couple of strategies you might consider for revision. After a while of reading and re-reading the same story it can start to seem pretty flat and you might not be able to make a strong connection with the work that you're doing. So I think it can be really helpful at that moment when you get stuck to look at, to look at your story in a format that you haven't used before. For example, if you've been working on a computer screen, print it out and you'd be amazed at the difference it makes when you actually see the thing on paper or if for example you've been only doing it on paper you might consider reading it on the screen. Another strategy, you could retype it. This might seem really laborious, but I think it can be often the step that makes the story really come together in your mind. In other words, print the story out, put it next to you, and retype it, the whole thing into a new fresh document. I often think of this as sort of piano practice, you start to put the thing together right from the beginning, and you'll see that. Forever once in a while your mind will wander away while the fingers keep on typing and things come to you in this way, in this sort of stupid way or you're doing this really sort of dumb work. I'm just typing the letters back in. Changes will come to you in that way that you've never considered before. A third option very important, read it out loud. If you haven't been reading it out loud you've been really missing out. There are things that come to you through your ear that wouldn't necessarily come to you through your eyes or if you're re-typing through your experience of your fingers. And then read it aloud again. You might open a voice memo on your phone or a tape recorder and tape yourself reading the story out loud. Then put in your ear buds and go for a walk and listen to yourself reading it. Again, it will sound different than you think it did. Next, after you've spent a lot of time revising the story you're probably thinking about it very slowly indeed. Well something you might do to correct that is to read the story with a pencil in your hand, and try to do it almost at the speed that a reader would read the story. If it's a 10 or 15 page story maybe that only takes half an hour or 35 minutes. And you'd be amazed that the connections that you make in your brain as you're reading it, that more normal pace. Somehow open up parts of the story that you wouldn't have thought of before. I often like to do that with a pencil in my hand. And only very quickly making little marks in the margin too. Remind myself that I had a thought at that particular moment. But that's stopping and not bearing down at that particular moment in the story. Yet another strategy. Print it and read it in a place or at a time of day that you've never used before for your work. If you are normally a morning writer and you only work on your story before you go to work, say. Well try printing it out in the morning, and then read it right before you go to bed. In other words, the light will change in your mind. All of your habits have changed, and you'll be able to see that story again from another point of view. As you do all of these revisions, pay attention to the places where you find yourself wanting to skim. Those are places where you haven't til now acknowledged that maybe the story's gotten a little boring. Now is the time for pushing on meaning, sense, and clarity. Places where you felt a wobble that you haven't wanted to acknowledge. Push on the language to make it clear. [MUSIC]
