Revision

I've been meaning to post something on revision for a long, long time, and now that I'm in the throes of it myself (revising the first draft of a short story that's taking way too long!), I thought I'd share some nuggets of wisdom from the masters:

Today's Revision Nugget: Yearning

I've blogged about this one before, but it's so important to every story, so critical, that I wanted to bring it to your attention again, this time in the context of revision.  Seems important to get this one thing right --really right-- before the rest of the story can fall into place the way it should:

Here's Robert Olen Butler (From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction):



REVISION TASK #1: Find the moment in your story or novel "in which the deepest yearning of your main character shines forth," surround it with sensual, authenticating detail, and make it sing! Force the reader to respond "in a deep, visceral way to that first epiphany." 
Go.  

Yearning

The story I've been drafting for the last two months has finally reached a conclusion, thank goodness, but now it's time to start over and figure out where it went so terribly wrong. About three-quarters of the way in, the story fizzled out. It was missing a key ingredient -- you guessed it:  yearning.  And without "yearning" the story literally had nowhere to go.

In neglecting to give my main character a strong desire line, I did what many beginning writers do (and some published authors as well). According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, yearning is as essential to the art of fiction "as color is to painting and movement is to dance and sound is to music."   He writes:

Butler gives us four wonderful literary examples from the works of Janet Burroway, Tom Piazza, Margaret Atwood, and James Joyce, in which the authors depict yearning through "beautiful moment-to-moment sensual details." He goes into great detail about each example, discussing line by line the ways in which the authors build coherence among the details, and how each main character's dynamic yearning begins to manifest itself in his or her particular story. I encourage everyone to get a copy of Butler's book and study that chapter in particular.

Below are examples (not Butler's) of yearning from two very different short stories.  The first is from Ryan Boudinot's short story "Cardiology." The protagonist is a boy who lives in a town "where nobody had their own heart.  They shared one gigantic heart located in a former water purification plant near the center of town."  The young man's yearning is very clearly stated -- to leave town and walk freely -- but not until after we get the a detail-packed description of what it is he'd be leaving behind. The moment-by-moment sensual detail in this piece is probably not what one would describe as "beautiful," but the writing is masterful and the detail makes Magnus's yearning shine forth -- vivid and clear. This passage comes just four paragraphs into the story:

In this example from Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Lost Brother" the character's yearning, that "first epiphany" comes in the very first paragraph:

So, armed with this new insight it's back to the drawing board for me -- back to the place where Sarah (my protagonist) drew her first breath as a character in my short story. Hopefully this time her yearning will shine forth for both of us.

What is it that your character yearns for at the deepest level of his being?

Robert Olen Butler:  From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

Ryan Boudinot: "Cardiology" at FiveChapters.com

Joyce Carol Oates: "The Lost Brother" in "Zoetrope All-Story", Spring 2005