Mean girls meet the revision machete
My go-to scene revision strategy
Join creative community at these upcoming storytelling events!
Next Story Jam is Thursday, May 8th at the Eno House Artists’ Den in Hillsborough, 6:30-8:30pm. Come and tell a story or be an enthusiastic audience member. The prompt is Mayday! Tell a story about a time you had to sound a distress call. What kind of help did you need? What happened?
The final performance for this spring’s storytelling class is Thursday, May 22nd, 7:30pm at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. It’s going to be a blast.
More frequent announcements of Story Connection events are being sent out separately from this Substack. If you are local to NC and want to get all the Story Connection updates, subscribe here.
It’s 1990. I’m 9 years old, playing four square at my new school with Danielle, Katie, and Molly who are obviously cooler than me, as demonstrated by their pierced ears, their outfits from Limited Too.
All the girls in my grade seem to have known each other for years. They have inside jokes I don’t get, an easy way about them, giggling and having fun. I want that—to giggle, have fun, be liked. So, though I’ve never played four square before and have little athleticism or coordination, I step up to the court.
The four square court has been on my mind as I work on my novel. I’m revising, going through each scene and asking the critical question: what’s the turn?
The turn is where the desire, expectation, or reality a character inhabited at the beginning of a scene changes.
The turn is where their desire is or isn’t met. Whatever happens, the outcome is key to story progression, establishing a new baseline for the character that drives plot.
Let’s go back to the four square court. Our protagonist’s baseline desire is to fit in. She chooses to play a game she has no experience in to try to meet that desire. So what happens?
The girls expertly move the ball back and forth while I watch. Danielle launches it deep into Molly’s square. Molly taps it short back to Danielle. Danielle pushes it over to Katie. It bounces in the middle of her square, then Katie firmly sends it back to Danielle, who sends it back to Molly. Molly one-hands her return, which bounces near the line between us. Katie deftly left hands it back to Molly.
Hey, are you bored yet? I am. So far, the protagonist’s desire has not really been tested. This back and forth falls short of building tension, and the turn is nowhere in sight.
This is something I see in my own draft scenes and those of my students—action that meanders or ping pongs back and forth, without effectively building to anything.
Although my first revision step could be to make this rising action more compelling1, my personal approach to revision is to find the turn first and then go back and fix the rising action. So let’s get to it:
Molly turns to me and slams the ball hard. It bounces a few feet in front of my Keds and rushes toward me. I reach out with both hands, praying I can get at least one of them on it, push it back into somebody else’s square. Somehow I connect with the ball, which bounces deep in Molly’s square, nicking the line.
“Out!” Danielle yells.
I blink. It wasn’t out. It was on the line. Which is in.
“It was in,” I say.
Molly shakes her head. “It was out.”
“No,” I say again, “It was in!”
“No,” Molly says louder. “It was OUT!”
I can’t stand it when people lie. “IN!” I yell, taking a step toward her.
“OUT!” Molly yells back, glaring at me.
Katie and Danielle have stepped in too. Their stares are ice cold and I want to punch them and run away at the same time. Tears press at the corners of my eyes.
I don’t know about you, but I’m interested now! There’s a meaty, urgent conflict. Tension is rising because each line heightens—voices get raised, bodies move closer, emotions are reaching a boiling point—which gives the reader a driving desire to know what’s going to happen next. Is our protagonist going to cave to social pressure, even if it means accepting their lie? Or is she going to stick to her guns? Friends, we have arrived at the turn!
“Your school sucks,” I growl and spin away quickly from their mean faces. Head down, I book it to the oak tree in the corner of the grassy play area. I spend the rest of recess sitting against it, knees to my chest, vowing I’ll never play four square again.
In this scene’s turn, the protagonist backs down. Her desire to be liked is not met. That resolution creates a new problem: how is she going to navigate tomorrow, another day at a school she has yet to find her place in?
Now that I know where the turn is, I revise around it, making sure the rising action leads logically to the turn—meaning there isn’t a jaunt to the library if the turn happens on the four square court, meaning the back and forth on the court needs to be improved2. I use pacing and depth to maintain a level of tension that keeps the reader engaged.
As I’ve mentioned on the podcast, one of my main revision tools is the machete. I’m an overwriter, and once I know the turn, I go at the scene aggressively, hacking away anything that doesn’t support the turn, the rising action, the resolution. Anything that is unnecessarily repetitive3, irrelevant, or straight up boring must be cut.
My drafts have a healthy amount of repetitive, irrelevant, and boring, so I do a lot of cutting, though not a lot of regretting—everything that gets macheted was something I needed to write to figure out what the scene was about, what the characters wanted, and how it went for them.
I’ve been thinking about the revision machete lately because there’s so much nonsensical rising action in the world. Because nothing makes me think more of a playground fight than two guys yelling bigger numbers at each other. Because there are an astonishing number of things I’d love to excise from the work in progress we are living through. Because I’d really like to know where the fucking turn is.
A thing I say frequently about revision is you can only manage a few elements at a time. So if a scene needs the turn clarified, the tension adjusted, the dialogue sharpened, and more setting, gesture, and choreography, well you can’t do all those things at once. The best approach is to pick one or two, work on those, and then when you’ve done your best, move on to the next element. As the patron saint of self-doubt reminds us, bird by bird.
Keep writing, friends.
This could be achieved in any number of ways: making the physical actions more drawn out and/or specific, adding narrator interiority, describing the setting and other people/activity in it, inserting exposition about why the narrator is at a new school, etc, etc, etc…
See previous footnote for ideas on how to do that.
There are exceptions to every rule—in rare cases repetition can be effective and purposeful. In my early drafts, it’s trash that needs to be taken out.
It was a good description of the action, ball movement in Four Square. Your character may not have been good at it but I’ll bet you were. The example is a good one to illustrate your point. Well done.
Chop chop friend.
I've seen that machete up close and while it remains sharp enough to give a scene a haircut, the deep swings taken in the tall weeds of early drafts are strong enough to carve a path towards story.
Great advice Julia!