Edit like an Editor: A Wattpad Featured Guide ✔

Part iv. How to Revise

Strong character conflict is crucial to creating a character with depth. An untested character is merely a sketch or portrait. When a character faces a conflict that truly matters, one in which the stakes are high enough that failure or success will affect his life in a fairly significant way, he comes interesting to the reader. His motivations for action or nonaction must be believable and convincing. With depth comes energy and vitality, and both are essential to good fiction.

A word about secondary characters: They don't need a lot of depth, but they must nonetheless ring true. Populating your story with secondary characters that are mere stereotypes or props will maim your main characters. After all, main characters play off secondary characters.

Secondary characters must contribute to the energy of the main characters in some way. An exception might be a ridiculous, one-dimensional secondary character who becomes an interesting foil for your main character. But as a general rule, keep this in mind: If secondary characters are plain dull without an underlying benefit—say, a comic effect—their contact and dialogue with the main character could affect this character in a negative way.

Range and Depth of Ideas

Any number of human issues come up in fiction: the condition of being human, the challenges to human happiness, and the compromises people make. All of these are important issues.

As you revise, avoid clichéd treatments of such issues, obvious conventions, and the hackneyed. Your first draft—unless your imagination has truly been charged and has led to some real surprises—will include some clichés. The whole draft, alas, might be one big cliché—don't be alarmed. Clichés can be freshened up.

Now it's time to rethink, re-experience, tackle the draft with new energy, and uncap something new. Read the story over carefully, and give your imagination another chance to have at it. To escape clichés, you must peer more deeply into your characters and their issues, going for as much complexity as you can. Again, this means deep-structure revision. Read more about clichés in the third section of this guidebook, Plot.

3. Work on Overall Focus

Writing a novel must have sharp focus, though how this focus is achieved certainly varies from work to work. Issues of focus naturally arise in the handling of plot and structure or the order of story parts. Plot-wise, does the story include extraneous material that sidetracks the reader? Structure-wise, are the story parts organized to achieve the desired effect? Or does the work feel scattershot? Be prepared as you revise your story to determine what is needed, what isn't, and where it should go structurally to create the best effect.

Basic Plot

A plot can lack clear focus if too many conflicts are included. If the plot is over complicated, the reader might miss the main conflicts. As you revise your manuscript, look for places to keep the key conflicts in the forefront of your reader's attention. If the cause-effect relation between various conflicts isn't clear—if the story doesn't advance clearly from A to B to C—the reader may become confused and the work will seem diffuse.

I don't mean to say you should aim to make the work overly obvious. You can keep the reader guessing, but by the end of a short story, the reader should be able to separate the main conflicts from the minor ones—and by the end of a novel, the reader should be able to separate the main plot from the subplot or subplots.

Also, don't clutter your work. The key is to find the heart of your story and dump what doesn't pertain. Ask yourself this: Does this material belong, or does it take the work off course? This is, of course, a judgment call.

Structure

Certainly, you will need to decide on the order of story parts: summary, flashback, scene, exposition, and description. Which should go first, second, third, and so on? Do as much as you can to avoid a scattered effect.