Radical Revision



For the radical revision, I want you to take a risk and attempt something that radically and fundamentally alters the story and its presentation. You may consider this paper as more of an experiment. As there can be no real risk-taking without the possibility of failure, I am not grading it on how successful it is as a story but rather how well the story fulfills the request of the first sentence and exhibits the spirit of experimentation. However, this is also not license to slap something together without the care, consideration, time, and effort we would devote to a "normal" story. Rewriting the conclusion, for example, isn't enough. Revision. Re-vision. To see it completely new as if for the first time. You may use either your workshop draft or your final draft for the radical revision. Here are some suggestions for radical revision:

1) Change the narration from first person to third or vice versa. Switch back and forth between the two.

2) Narrate from the point of view of another character, an animal, or an object.

3) Double, multiple, or meta-voice. Narrate from more than one point of view and voice. Perhaps the voices are competing with one another for textual space and/or conflicting with each another concerning essential facts or opinions of the story, its events, timing, and characters.

4) Take away the narrator's or central character's sense or hearing or sight or give him/her/it a serious physical or mental disability and see how that affects the narration and events of the story.

5) Set the story one hundred years (or more) in the past or future.

6) Tell the story backwards. I am thinking of Charles Baxter's First Light. Thus, we read the story not to find out what will happen but how it happened, not to see what characters will do but why they made the choice they made, not to see who they will become but who they once were, not to find out how or if tension will resolve but how it started.

7) Radical changes in typography and layout. Different fonts for speakers and emphasis. Numerals for letters. Visuals. Font and type changes. Space differently. Print on green paper.
a forest iitititititi
a bug -)-) -)-)<
a crater on the moon (*)

( ( (     T     i     m     3        s    1     0    w    s
d
  *
w
  n    ) ) )
These changes are deliberate, controlled strategies designed to reflect, reinforce, or disrupt certain aspects of your story.

8) Cut your story in half. Go through block and delete or condense whole sentences, scenes, characters, or paragraphs. Strip the story down to the essentials.

9) Make all sentences no longer than five words.

10) Change the tense of all narration.

11) Genre change. Try making your story fantasy, science fiction, horror, and so forth. Tell the story in a series of connecting haiku (remember that there is more to writing haiku than just observing the 5-7-5 syllable count). Present the story as a series of letters, e-mails, sermons, sutras, or journal entries (this should be more than just a cut and paste job). Turn your story into a comic book using images from the Internet and/or your own drawing (remember I'm not grading you on the quality of your drawing). Make a game out of your story complete with rules, playing pieces, and board or cards. At this point, I would not consider micro fiction radical revision.

12) Tell the story in stream of consciousness as in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," or various works by James Joyce and William Faulkner. Playing around with punctuation by removing paragraph breaks or rendering paragraphs as one sentence. Splice multiple sentences together. Write in fragments. Use dashes or commas instead of periods. Remember that the key to writing in this voice is to present thoughts, ideas, reactions, and impressions at the moment the character experiences them.
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