Revision And Self-Editing (Write Great Fiction)

This is in many ways a perfect companion to Bell's classic Plot & Structure. It covers virtually every aspect of the fiction craft and gives dozens of techniques for improving each. (Oddly, some comments seem to have missed this obvious point. There is almost no repetition of the material in the Plot book. These two volumes completely complement each other).

Here is one example, worth the price of the book: How to get HIP to your scenes. HIP stands for Hook, Intensity and Prompt. Understanding these concepts will make every scene in your novel more gripping, whatever genre you write in.

The Revision section is also one of the most helpful tools you'll find anywhere. It provides a systematic approach to editing, something all writers need. Using Bell's guidance, you won't find yourself flopping around wondering what to fix next. Bell helpfully points to the most common flaws you'll find when revising, with ideas on how to handle them.

What I love about this book, and Plot & Structure, is how down to earth and easily understood it is. Bell is not writing to puff himself up, but to help other writers. That is greatly appreciated by me.

While named Revision & Self-Editing, this book really is a quick overview on the craft of a novel writing. Part one, 190 pages of the 262-page book, is entitled Self-editing. Yet, instead of specific revision tips and exercises, Bell skims through the basics on what's involved in writing a solid novel. It's all good advice, offering gentle reminders of what we may have forgotten. But, it's not on the topic his title promised. Part Two, entitled Revision, is only 60 pages, 10 of which discuss the need for discipline in writing. Meanwhile, the section on how to consider revisions for endings is only two pages.

While this book might be helpful to younger, less experienced writers, the books, plays and films he chooses as examples, i.e. The Maltese Falcon, The Odd Couple, and The Searchers , might not be familiar or relevant to that audience.

The book's main strength comes from Bell's easy, conversational style to make his brief, yet obvious, points.

The book's weakness is its title. It's misleading, and readers are sure to be disappointed.

If you're looking for a book about revision, pass on this one. This book misses its mark by not going far enough into the self-editing and revision process. Instead, it quickly offers obvious and basic advice in how to write a novel. And if you're looking for a book on crafting a novel, others work better.

Having bought Plot and Structure from the same series and found it helpful, I was looking forward to reading this book. However, huge chunks of this have been copied and pasted from Plot and Structure, so much so that I feel I've been conned into buying the same book twice. Don't make the same mistake yourself - this is a rip-off.

This is part of the Writer's Digest "Write Great Fiction" series. I found Bell's other book in the series, Plot and Structure, to be quite helpful, so I was interested in seeing what this one had to offer. I've already developed my own "system" for revising, basically starting with big issues and working down to the detailed polishing. But revision is such an important part of the writing process that I wanted to get as much advise on the subject as I could.

I imagined this book would be devoted exclusively to revision and editing strategies: how to use critique groups, friends as readers, the mechanics of moving text around or rearranging scenes while maintaining flow, record-keeping strategies, which problems to address first, etc. That's not what it is, for the most part. The first two-thirds of the book, although titled "Self-Editing", is really a distillation of writing advice on standard topics, such as plot, character, dialog, point of view, etc. If you own some of the other books in this series, this will be familiar territory. And the subjects are approached mostly from the point of view of how to write well rather than how to edit what you've already written.

The final third of the book, titled "Revision", gets into more of the nuts-and-bolts material I had imagined the book to be about. A fair amount of this is pep-talk or philosophy of writing, but the heart of this section is a revision checklist. This is a genuinely useful tool: a list of things to check your writing for, listed in an order that makes sense (big-picture stuff first). There are "key questions" and "common fixes" for each element of fiction. If nothing else, this helps alleviate the feeling one can have, sitting down to revise of manuscript, of being overwhelmed with all the different things that might need work. I know I have a tendency to revise in a few areas and neglect others. The checklist is a good cure for that.

Still, there wasn't much in this book that I hadn't already read or figured out for myself. No "magic bullets" for foolproof and efficient revision.
All that said, I think this is an excellent book, especially for aspiring writers who have not read other books or taken classes on the subject. It has the virtue of covering everything and emphasizing the importance of revision in the creative process. In fact, if someone were beginning to write fiction and wanted a single book to learn from, this is the one I'd recommend. Bell's prose is clear and engaging, his examples are cogent, and his advice is sound. He's not teaching a rigid method or promoting his personal preferences, just presenting the basics of good fiction writing in a way that any new writer can understand and apply.

If you don't have any books on writing, this is a highly recommended place to start. If you've bought and read a shelf full of them, you've probably got what you need already.

With four such self-help books on my shelf, I hardly need another, but I bought this one anyway. The first four were full of all the "do nots" that, if your name is John Grisham or James Lee Burke, must read like comedy (to them). Seriously, if you take all these "do nots" to heart, you'll never live through reading the next best seller because the name brand authors "do not" pay attention to these "do nots". Take for example: "Do not start a sentence with a word that ends in -ing." E.g. "Walking into the room, Don saw the man hanging by his neck from the rafter." And one of my favorites, "Do not end a sentence with a preposition." (Or what? Someone shoots me?) But the big boys do it all the time! Why? Because that's the way people talk most of the time.

Nevertheless, I'm very glad I bought this fifth book. James Scott Bell gives the reader stuff he/she can not only use, but that will spark new ideas on "how" to write in more interesting/realistic dialog (for example). But there's a lot more than dialog lessons here.

There is a particularly good chapter (5) on "plot & structure." However, his chapter on "point of view" serves up the same old "point of view" about first person that, again, the big boys must giggle at (try reading James Lee Burke for example). Normally, I hate exercises in a textbook, but I found myself quite fascinated by the ones in the back of this book.

All in all, this is the best, most helpful book on revisions and self-editing I've read over the past 12 years. It is not simply a rehash of grammar 101 and guidlines for editors (when there were such animals) from the 1950's. There are many excellent ideas and gremlins to watch out for. "Running through the garage, Frank threw his other four self-help editing books in the dumpster." I rest my case.