Tag Archive for ‘revision’
Revising Nonfiction
Sometimes when you’re revising it helps to have a specific assignment. Last week in this space I listed some exercises that my fiction-writing students find useful. Here are some revision ideas that my memoir and journalism students particularly like: 1) Write down three adjectives (beautiful, aggressive, haughty) that describe a character in your narrative/memoir. (Be sure the adjectives describe different qualities, not the same ones. For instance, handsome, well-groomed, muscular are too similar, as opposed to handsome, talkative, and mechanically [...]
Five Ways to Jumpstart a Revision
This week I’m working on revising fiction with my undergraduate and grad students at Fordham. Below are some of the tips and ideas I’ve collected over the years that my students find most useful. (Next week I’ll talk in this space about the best exercises I’ve found for revising nonfiction.) 1) First, answer these questions: What is my story about? Another way of saying this is: What is the pattern of change? Once this pattern is clear, you can check [...]
