Welcome again to STEM Tuesday! I’m Stephanie.
When you’ve been writing for a long time, coming across an old piece of writing is like finding a fossil—it’s a record of a bygone era: incomplete, stripped of context, languishing unstudied. The metaphor breaks down eventually, because I’m no paleontologist, but you get the idea. We all have tidbits of stories that we’ve never completely unearthed, or found all the pieces of. And in that spirit, instead of generative prompts, today we have revision prompts!
Revision Prompt 1 | Dig, Discover, Excavate
Pickaxes and rock hammers ready? It’s time to revisit a piece of writing, something you haven’t looked at for a long time. Where do you keep these things? I have discarded notebooks, a drawer of ideas jotted on paper scraps, a list of odd facts, and files scattered on two computers. Wherever your archeological dig site, take a good look, skimming and rereading…
(Teachers, have students select excerpts from classroom journals or past assignments. Define a scope for your students… do you want them to revise a single sentence, a paragraph, a story idea?)
- Look for something that catches your eye, for whatever reason. Select a dusty piece but one that seems to say, “I have more to give.” Maybe you thought nothing of it when you wrote it, but now you’re not sure where it came from. It could be strange, or funny, dark-humored or sentimental. Mysterious. Playful. Whatever you like, but something you want to spend time on: something with a hook.
- For at least 10 minutes, do some exploratory writing, examining what you’ve found. What’s the size of your “fossil”
Whale skeleton on sandy land in a desert. Picture by Rachel Claire. Used with permission.
(writing sample)? What’s its nature? What do you like about it? What does the language do: nail an authorial tone that you like? perfectly capture a universal truth? Where did it come from, within you? answering these and the following questions. Does your fossil want to tell a fiction story, or a non-fiction one? What motivates you to excavate around it? What do you hope to find?
- Write down as many revision options for yourself as possible—and make them differ widely in scope, tone, and even genre. Think mash-ups. Think metaphors. Don’t edit your options. Go for variety.
- Next, discuss your revision ideas with someone else. If nobody is available, say them aloud anyway. Talk through them. Pick any two significantly different ideas and write them out for 10 minutes each.
If you feel exhausted, it’s well deserved. You dug. You discovered. You excavated. Congrats on your findings! Maybe you’ll continue to revise this piece, or maybe a year from now you’ll dig, discover, and excavate again. After all, the writing process sometimes feels paced like the geologic eras.
Revision Prompt 2 | Fragmented Storytelling
Fossils are seldom found complete. It’s more common to find fragments, and I find memory to be the same way. With creative nonfiction such as I’ve been writing lately for my undergrad classes, while the setting, characters, and events must be accurate, the license to embellish covers a good swath of gray area, such as story structure. Where memory fails, creative nonfiction offers artful transitions. Where historical gaps exist, the genre says, (since know it’s creative) give us approximations of the truth, renditions of it. Give us stories based on true stories.
Sometimes constructing context requires this sort of fragmented, non-linear, woven storytelling. It requires a rhetorical look at sequencing. If that’s something you like, maybe take a look at Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems by editors Sarah Giragosian and Virginia Konchan. It’s a compilation of essays about how to organize poems, but not-so-secretly, I think the methods for motif layering are similarly applicable to prose.
- Print both of your revisions from above, double spaced. You may want to print more than one copy each, since this exercise is about experimentation, and there’s always more than one way to revise a sentence. Cut your “fossil” into white strips of paper—individual words, phrases, entire sentences or paragraphs. Now piece these together like the bones of a skeleton. Create a new story using fragments. The story should become both and neither of the stories it was before.
- There’s no “wrong” way to do this exercise, but the important part is to break sentences in search of better sentences, to braid metaphors from each version, to look for surprises buried in the words that are already yours. Perhaps you wrote an entire paragraph that’s perfect as it is… almost. Can you substitute a better word from your other story? Alternate sentences. Try reversing parts of the story, or parts of the sentences. Where might sentence fragments do a better job of communicating than a whole sentence would?
How much fragmentation is too much fragmentation? That’s up to you and the story you’re telling. This is, after all, just an exercise. If your new piece feels too fragmented, adjust as necessary.
Do you still like the paleontology metaphor for writing? I’ll be posting some of my extra fossil-themed writing prompts on my website very soon!
All my best,
Stephanie
A nature-loving creative, Stephanie Jackson writes poems, articles, picture books, middle-grade novels, and more. Her nonfiction has been published in Cricket magazine and her poems have been published in The Dirigible Balloon and various literary journals including Touchstones, where she’s been a contributing poetry editor. Professional affiliations include the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and The Authors Guild. This spring she’s graduating from Utah Valley University with her English degree, emphasis in creative writing. She interacts with the kidlit community on Twitter as @canoesandcosmos, and you can read more at StephanieWritesforKids.com.
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