Revise and Resubmit: Strategies for Expanding and Deepening Your Short Fiction
Writer & submissions reader shares insights about revising fiction
Welcome to our weekly column on the ins and outs of lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors everywhere.
By B.B. Garin
If you’re a persistent submitter, eventually you may receive a reply that goes something like this:
“Although we are not prepared to accept it [your story] yet, we are wondering if you would care to revise and develop your characters more. It is a haunting piece but would have more emotional impact if you added to it, at least in our opinion. If you do revise, please send to…”
That’s part of a revise & resubmit letter I received a few years ago from a fairly well-respected literary magazine. I tried to look at it as a win. I’d made it out of the slush pile, after all. Someone had liked my story enough to offer more than a form rejection. I even still had a chance at publication with the magazine. (Spoiler Alert: they didn’t take it, even after I revised). The response frustrated me, though. Because I had revised this piece. Quite extensively, in fact. The problem was I’d revised it in the wrong direction.
I’d been revising to contract, when I should’ve been revising to expand.
Writers are so often told to tighten up their prose, kill their darlings, and all manner of other cliches aimed at shrinking a story down to its sleekest essence. But like a bad fad diet, this strategy can often leave stories missing vital nutrients.
Yes, the road to hell may very well be paved with adverbs, as Stephen King so readily asserts. I’m all for eliminating unnecessary words. However, before you hit delete, ask yourself if that word is acting as a placeholder for something essential.
In a first draft, you might come across a line like, “She quietly whispered.” Red Alert: Repetitive Adverb! The efficient writer swoops in and does away with it. But why did your brain insert “quietly” the first time around? Is it perhaps because you wanted to express something about this character’s stillness at that moment? Her self-containment? Her reticence? “Quietly” might be holding the place of a more meaningful description. Cutting it will result in cleaner prose. But cutting it and replacing it can result in more insightful prose, such as, “Hand pressed to the cold window pane, she whispered.” Now we have a barrier. Now we have a woman reaching out and restrained. Now, with just six extra words, we have a full picture.
New writers are often reluctant about revisions because they’re afraid of doing too much. A common question is, how do I know when to stop? Be ruthless, is the advice usually given to counter this hesitancy. Darlings, murder, etc.
The problem, I find, is this leaves no room for the equally important, trust your instincts. The clunky description, the overblown metaphor—that’s your writerly mind trying to work something out. Don’t dismiss it because the powers that be insist elimination is key. Examine it as a potential stepping stone to something better.
This is not to say every word should be expanded on. Absolutes are never helpful in writing, or in life, really. Of course, there will be things that simply have to go. The plot may change and whole scenes will no longer make sense. A character may develop in a way that renders certain dialogues unrealistic. There is plenty of cutting to be done in any revision. Yet, now that I write feedback letters on submissions myself, I find myself more often than not giving some version of the advice I received in that letter. A character needs more development. The conflict would have more impact if it were expanded on. The story doesn’t seem flushed out enough.
Revising with an eye towards subtracting tends to focus a writer on the language. If you’re looking for the tangible results of watching a word count dip to a certain number, you’ll naturally put most of your energy towards searching out any stray phrase for the chopping block. And while I do think detailed attention to language is important, I’m also a big advocate of saving it for last. In fact, I think of it as a separate phase of my writing process entirely.
After I’ve revised and feel the story is fully developed and coherent, I undertake what I think of as my “word perfect revision.” A more prosaic person would probably call it editing. The point is, I save this language-level slimming for the end, because it’s much harder to disturb a paragraph once you’ve spent precious time ensuring every word of it is perfect.
Focusing on language too early in the revision process can also lead a writer to feel like they’re done when they haven’t really started yet. I often see submissions that are nearly flawless on a line level. It’s clear the writer has spent a good amount of time crafting their sentences. They know the mechanical dos and don’ts, and have utilized this knowledge effectively. But the story still feels flat. Like an artfully decorated cake that was never baked.
These stories need more time in the oven. They need to rise and expand. And unlike all the handy tricks out there for cutting down a story, there’s no simple formula for expansion. Which is probably another reason writers struggle with it. Much easier to eliminate all the sight related verbs in a story than to explore why a character feels sad every time he sees a blue car.
The places that most often seem in need of expansion, at least in the submissions I read, tend to come in the second half of a story, and revolve around character development and conflict. Such pieces start out strong, then hurtle to an ending. The characters never fully emerge or engage with the conflict. The effects of the problem aren’t being felt. Things just stop.
This always leaves me wondering if the writer realized at a certain point that they were approaching 2,000, or 5,000, or whatever the word count limit was for the magazine they’re hoping to submit to and decided, “Well, I have to stop now or it won’t get published.” And then a little piece of my soul dies. Because this is almost a guarantee of an unsatisfying ending. A story needs as many words as it needs. True, a longer piece might exclude you from certain markets. A shorter piece might, too. The beauty of our abundant lit mag marketplace is that there’s a home out there for your work, whatever the final word count. So please, don’t end a story because it has enough words. End a story when enough has been said.
Which brings me back to the piece I was offered a revise and resubmit on. It had a simple plot; a young woman in a small town meets a man, they fall in love, he has a secret and eventually it forces him to leave her. Not terribly original, but I thought the characters were solid. It was tightly written and well-paced. Obviously, there was enough going for it to warrant a second look. And what I realized, after about a week of sitting with that editor’s two lines of advice bouncing around my head, was it did need more development.
The first half the story followed their initial encounters. The second half had one scene just before the secret comes out, and the rest was comprised of the reveal and fallout. I’d glossed right over their life together. I hadn’t earned the emotional impact I wanted for the ending, because I hadn’t invested any time in developing their relationship. The sense of loss I wanted to create wasn’t resonating because I hadn’t taken the time to show what my main character was actually losing.
So, I went back. I added descriptions. Dialogues. Whole scenes. They weren’t action-packed or full of deep emotional turmoil. But they let me explore the silences in their relationship. The things he doesn’t say, the things she chooses not to notice. This in turn created fault lines, building more tension into the piece. I ended up increasing the word count by almost 50%, and by expanding in this way, the story gained a depth I had been unable to achieve in my previous, subtraction-focused revisions.
As I said, the magazine still turned me down. A revise & resubmit isn’t a promise of anything. I found it to be a valuable process though, because it left me with a stronger story. One that was eventually accepted by another publication. I look at revision now as a time for broadening my stories, for digging to the molten center and discovering what still needs to bubble up.
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I agree about revising a piece to your own standards and making it better (which is often shorter). I generally don't listen to one single journal telling me to revise a piece to their subjective editorial standards in hope of a future acceptance. From my own and from friends' experience, this rarely works out. A writing workshop leader once said, "Unless a journal or book publisher accepts your work with the provision that you make revisions, ignore them. Otherwise, you make substantial changes to writing that may have been fine as it was for other editors, with no guarantee that it will be accepted by the journal that requested revisions." Submit widely and join a writers group with good writers.
I found this piece very helpful. Struggling right now with constraining word count versus adding emotional depth and certain missing details. Thank you, B. B. Garin!