Revising Fiction (Trade Paperback)

by Kirt Hickman

In every work of fiction, there’s so much to be concerned about: plot, characterization, scene structure, setting, backstory, dialogue, and pacing. You must maintain suspense, portray your characters’ emotions, show events rather than tell about them, make effective use of comparisions, and achieve consistency of style and voice. You must avoid passive voice, information dumps, repeated information, digressions, clichés, and unnecessary words and phrases. Finally, you must mind the details of grammar, spelling, word usage, punctuation, and format. Whew!

How do you catch it all?
How do you know when you've got it right?
How do you even know where to start?

Revising Fiction will answer these questions and many, many more.

If you’re tired of reading books, taking classes, and attending talks and conferences that don’t give you what you need, Revising Fiction is the book you’ve been searching for.

Within these pages, you’ll find:

• A comprehensive treatment of the entire writing and revision process, from planning your novel, to first draft, through revision, to final product.
• A practical approach that makes the concepts fun to learn and easy to apply.
• Hundreds of examples.
• Over 150 passages of unpolished writing revised to correct problems.
• Two full chapters of case studies.
• Reading recommendations for those who desire a more intensive study of specific writing areas such as plot development, characterization, or scene structure.
• A self-editing checklist

Revising Fiction will give you the tools you need to bang your manuscript into shape, once and for all.

Trade Paperback

$24.95

Quillrunner price: $19.95

>>> Click Here to Read A Sample Chapter

Reviews

Revising Fiction is one of the best books I've read on the arduous task of revision. And I've read plenty. Unlike most books that take a cursory look at the revision process, Hickman rolls up his sleeves and digs into the grittiest aspects of examining fiction for flaws. Hickman is an engineer by training and it shows. His approach to revision is systematic, leaving no word unexamined. Before he finished this book, Hickman lent me his working outline. I used it as my guide for revising my own fiction. I've never found a better guide to the revision process. His finished book fleshes out the outline with detailed examples of how to polish your storytelling to a brilliant gleam. Use this book. It will certainly improve your fiction.

— Rob Spiegel

After you’ve toiled over your novel and had it critiqued by writer-friends who proclaimed it "good" and "enjoyable," it may not be polished. How do you know what’s wrong with it or how you can fix it?

Kirt Hickman’s Revising Fiction takes us through every pothole, cliché, awkward phrase, and how to solve each of them. His examples are smart and original, pithy and to-the-point. They allow you to think outside the box, and write more powerful scenes with more conflicted characters. He shows how strong verbs increase tension, actions, and even descriptions.

Revising Fiction entertains as it teaches, stimulates more ideas, and allows you to use more of your imagination. Unlike several other revision books, it’s an enjoyable trip and worth the time.

— Eileen Stanton

Revising Fiction ranks at the top of my list of "how to" writing books. Clear, concise, exceedingly readable, it is better than any writing book to date. Hickman doesn't talk down to the reader. His goal, exceptionally done, is to help writers. Every writer should have this on his desk. Highly recommended.

— Melody Groves, author of award-winning Arizona War

Novelists who dare proceed past writing a first draft soon learn the real work of creating a novel worth reading lies in the complicated process of revision. Kirt Hickman promises in the introduction of REVISING FICTION, MAKING SENSE OF THE MADNESS, to break the exhaustive list of revision concerns into a practical and effective approach. He does just that. As a writer, I've studied many books on revision. As a freelance editor, I've suggested many titles to clients. Kirt Hickman's REVISING FICTION is now my number one recommendation to writers interested in making their novels marketable.

— Keith Pyeatt, freelance editor and author of the paranormal thriller STRUCK

Kirt Hickman’s book, Revising Fiction: Making Sense of the Madness, is refreshingly different from most of the books in the piles of titles about the craft of writing. Those books talk about writing; Kirt Hickman shows how it is actually done.

For an informational self-help book to be good it must have four things – be audience and target specific, be timely, be well written and comprehensive and, be immediately useful. Hickman covered each of these points very well. Revising Fiction is exactly what it is advertised to be - a comprehensive and practical guide to self-editing. The book is broken up into bite sized chunks of easy to read information, each section well laid out taking the reader from the fundamentals of defining your theme and planning your attack, to plot, point of view, formatting and critiques. In between you’ll find advice and direction on creating the proper setting and tone, keeping the voice constant and dealing with the grammatical problems we all grapple with.

Hickman focuses his attention on techniques for effective self-editing, but in the process he also introduces basic principles essential for good fiction writing. He does this through extensive use of textual examples that illustrate problems in areas such as dialog, point of view, storytelling techniques, and character development. He then edits these texts with the reader looking over his shoulder, a process that reveals what exactly is wrong in the examples, how to do it better, and the kind of difference better technique makes. Observing Mr. Hickman at work in this way is an effective way to improve one’s own writing.

In regard to the task of editing, Hickman presents a clear and effective process. Editing can be a frustrating job, consuming days of work that, in the end, fail to address the real problems in a manuscript. Revising Fiction charts an approach that will allow a writer to identify the issues that need correction and address those efficiently. These techniques include breaking the story into scenes and asking specific questions about each scene in order to determine if it is advancing either the plot or character development. Hickman also advocates editing an entire manuscript with attention to one factor at a time. A writer could, for example, move through the text with a focus on its attributives (“he said, she said” etc.) and then re-examine the entire manuscript with attention to the use of specific types of words like adverbs or verbs. Hickman advocates the use of tools like note cards (a sort of after-the-fact storyboarding) to help visualize the relationship between scenes so problems in the area of consistency can be identified and color-coding to highlight word combinations prone to grammatical errors. These techniques are not complicated and will turn the frustration of editing into fruitful work, saving time in the process.

Hickman writes for the fiction author but a non-fiction writer will also find his techniques invaluable. While non-fiction writers do not need to advance a plot, they do advance an argument and the advice he gives for breaking a text into scenes helps the writer to avoid repetition of ideas and facilitates rearrangement of the writer’s arguments. In the same way, while non-fiction writers do not use much dialog, they do introduce quotations and the techniques Hickman teaching to improve the flow of dialog help make the introduction of quoted material more interesting.

In the end good writing is good writing and Kirt Hickman has produced a book that will improve the writing of anyone who reads it and puts its ideas to work. A writer could attend many workshops and buy many books about writing but would find most of what they learned was included in this one comprehensive and practical guide. This is not a book to hide on the shelf but to keep readily available on the writer’s desk.

— 3/10 Reviewed by Jim Thompson, author of The Physics of Genesis
and Gregory J. Saunders, author of the Trilogy, Unknown Country ReadingNewMexico.com.

About The Author

Kirt Hickman, author of the 2008 science-fiction conspiracy thriller Worlds Asunder, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1966. Kirt was a technical writer for fourteen years before branching into fiction. During his technical career, he made a living out of taking complex sets of requirements, or in this case advice, and boiling them down into simple, effective procedures. His methodical approach to self-editing has helped many make sense of the mass of writing advice available to the novice reader. He teaches self-editing classes through SouthWest Writers. He has been a mentor in the SWW mentoring program and has participated in discussion or critique panels for multiple SWW conferences. Throughout 2008, he contributed a monthly, full-page column titled “Revising Fiction’ to the SouthWest Sage.

Last Updated: September 4, 2010