Cathy and I were driving to our friends’ house for a meal—we were supposed to bring dessert—when it came to me that I’d better ask her if she’d remembered to bring the cake she’d made.

She said. . .well, I’ll let you imagine what she said when she realized the cake was still in its pan on our kitchen island. She was driving, and we were twenty-five minutes from our friends’ house and a good fifteen minutes from ours.

“I’m going back to get it,” she said.

And that’s what we did. We retraced our route, got the cake, and set off again, arriving about thirty minutes past the time we were supposed to get there.

But get there, we did.

When we write the first draft of any narrative, whether it be fiction or creative nonfiction, we can celebrate the fact that we made it to the end, understanding that we’ll need to go back through what we’ve written, looking for things we may have forgotten.

We can look for the following:

 

1. Pivotal moments in the plot that we need to dramatize.

 

2. Places where we need to slow down.

 

3. Opportunities to provide clear motivation for our characters’ actions.

 

4. Places where we may need to sharpen the dialogue. Maybe it needs to rely on subtext. Maybe it needs to be more concise. Maybe it needs to move the plot along in a timelier manner.

 

5. Opportunities to use metaphor and image to reinforce the thematic concerns of the narrative.

 

6. Places where we need to round our characters by seeing something in them we’ve failed to notice.

 

7. Moments that call for more interiority on our characters’ parts, so we can better understand the significance of the action.

 

8. Places where the prose breaks down. Maybe our language has become too abstract. Maybe we lack sentence variety. Maybe the tone is off. Maybe the dialogue is stilted. We should try reading our narratives aloud to see where we stumble.

 

9. Places where we feel uncomfortable because we’re rubbing up against something that’s personally difficult for us. Those are the places where we need to bear down. If we feel ourselves squirming, we need to ask ourselves why. We need to go deeper to bring out aspects of the narrative we’re afraid to expose.

 

10. Things we can cut. For instance, have we provided more backstory than we need? Have we written scenes that really don’t fit? We should ask ourselves why everything on the page is essential to where the narrative ends. If it isn’t, let it go.

 

I could keep adding to my list. For instance, have we added just the right number of concrete details? Have we considered the setting and how it makes the narrative possible? Have we thought about how our characters act either in accordance with, or in opposition to, the prevailing cultural values of the place where the narrative takes place?

I’ll leave it here for now, though, with these thoughts about shaping our revision strategy. We set out on a narrative path, but sometimes, like my story of Cathy and me and the cake, we forget to pay attention, and we must go back. We can return to our narratives as many times as necessary, asking ourselves whether we’ve done all we can to let the work fully realize its intentions.