Before I went to Italy, I started drafting a new manuscript during the 1,000 Words of Summer effort. I was in a good flow of getting words on the page so I kept it going throughout the summer, which feels like it may become my new writing routine, btw. But anyway, I’d gotten pretty far into it at roughly 27k words before my trip. Once there though, my mind was blown about how to approach this story. It changed the lens I was originally seeing it through.

With that, this marks the first time that I drafted so many words and have decided to start over from scratch. Typically, once I’m started, I will edit that thing ad nauseum until something beautiful emerges. But I’d heard from other writers that they simply write a zero draft to get things out of their head and then start to write the real story. Angie Thomas talks about this in her craft book, Find Your Voice. I wanted to be brave enough to do this at other stages, but it felt like I would be losing all this great stuff if I started over. Not true.

So, I’m starting over! And yes, I have both drafts open because there is some really good stuff in there that I will still be able to transfer to the new draft. But I noticed I was trying to find the story on those initial pages and now it’s time to tell the story. During the residency, I dug into the real motivations of the character, their actual wounds, what the arc is, and immediately realized my beginning wasn’t my beginning. Also, what I thought was the climax is probably more of the inciting incident, honestly. Or rising tension. Either way, it happens earlier than I first imagined.

Instead of trying to frankenstein my way into making the original draft make sense, I opened up a brand new word document and it was a liberating moment. In addition to starting anew, I’m also writing scenes by hand before I enter them into the word doc. It has done wonders for my ability to give myself more time to think. It has slowed down my brain. It helps me to stop when I don’t have anything else and come back to it each day energized. Something about typing I think helps you push through the moments when you probably need more time to think. But I’ve mentioned on my various platforms I’m working on taking my time more, letting the scene breathe. This is the perfect way to do that and now when I type my work into the computer, I’m also able to do a bit of revising there too.

It’s both terrifying and exciting to be starting from scratch. But there is a different tone now, overall I feel. I understand my protagonist much better. I’m learning to trust myself, that I can continually find new ways to say things and that giving myself more time tends to only make it better. I’ve revised that first line a million ways and got some input on it. My two first line beta readers agreed on one iteration, which I thought was so useful.

A couple of other techniques that I will be bringing into the fold as I work on this manuscript were provided by Chris Abani. He had us do an exercise where we edited a small piece of our work for different things each time.

Passive language
Adverbs/Adjectives
Commentary

We read the piece without all those things and then with them and nine times out of ten, leaving out these things made the work stronger. Not saying we eradicate these things altogether, clearly they’re important elements of writing, but it was showing us how to be much more selective about where we add them. Is it needed? In this way, I started to think about revision as much more subtractive. Getting down to the meat of the thing. Often we can add a lot of language that sounds beautiful but it’s necessary to ask ourselves, which parts of this move the story forward and which parts of this is simply for my ego? To showcase how amazing of a writer I am. It’s a delicate balance. I’m always reminded of Maya Angelou’s statement that “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

While I’d been editing unnecessary words like just, really, definitely, this was giving me other passes to take during my revision process. I’m getting my highlighters ready for when I get to the printing phase of revision.

The important thing to note here is that these are all tools to add to your toolbox, not necessarily to be used all at once, all the time. Remember, each project tends to require something different. Where I am currently requires a bit more thoughtfulness, time, attention to detail, craft, and so I’ve been implementing different practices to get to where I want to go. I’m excited to see the results.

Princeton Arts Fellowships, funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, David E. Kelley Society of Fellows in the Arts, and the Maurice R. Greenberg Scholarship Fund, will be awarded to artists whose achievements have been recognized as demonstrating extraordinary promise in any area of artistic practice and teaching. Applicants should be early career visual artists, filmmakers, poets, novelists, playwrights, designers, directors and performance artists—this list is not meant to be exhaustive—who would find it beneficial to spend two years teaching and working in an artistically vibrant university community. (Closes Soon, Sept. 10).

We Need Diverse Books mentorship program is accepting applications. The Mentorship program aims to support writers and illustrators by pairing them with an experienced professional in the field. Our mentors work one-on-one with a mentee and their completed draft of a manuscript over the course of a year, offering advice to improve craft and to better understand the publishing industry. (Closes Sept. 15th).

Lambda Literary is accepting applications for their 2025 Periplus Fellowship. Periplus is a mentorship collective serving U.S. writers of color. We’re looking for mentees — Periplus Fellows — who are people of color, are located in the United States, and are at least 18 years old, and whose writing shows great promise. (You are not eligible for a Periplus Fellowship if you are currently taking classes as part of a degree-granting program — e.g., high school, college, or any graduate program – or if you have a book published or under contract with a major U.S. press in a genre in which we mentor.) (Closes Sept. 21).

The Yale Review is accepting submissions for their yearly reading period. Poems, essays and translations. All submissions to The Yale Review must be in English and previously unpublished in print or online (including on private websites/blogs). We are happy to consider simultaneous submissions but ask that we be notified if a piece is accepted for publication elsewhere. Please note we do not consider pitches through our genre-specific submission forms, only entire pieces. If you have a pitch you’d like us to review, please see our pitch guidelines here. (Closes Sept. 30th).

Philadelphia Stories is accepting submissions for their fiction contest. This is a national short fiction contest that features a first place $1,000 cash award and three $250 runner-up cash awards. The winning stories will be published in the print issue of the Winter/Spring 2025 issue of Philadelphia Stories. We especially encourage writers from underrepresented groups and backgrounds to send their work. (Closes Dec. 1st)