Grab Bag - Writing Articles - Revision & Characters

Continuing some items I gathered while down with my sinus infection and then recuperation. I am still off on my daily reports.

I have taken to reading Angela Yuriko Smith's Substack on writing and life - only I got behind in that reading. What follows are my notes from two of her posts. 

With all the rejections piling up, I begin wondering is it the story or my prose? The former means to me that I have not written a compelling character. The latter makes me question how I have put the story together - structure overall and at the sentence level, dialog's content; the technical stuff. 

Revision, Not Reinvention: Designing ourselves with intention and care

 As writers, we know the difference between a character who wants something and a character who is constructed to move through the story in a particular way. Want alone doesn’t carry a narrative. A character can want many things and still remain inert on the page.

Construction is what gives desire traction. It’s the combination of values, limitations, habits, fears, and boundaries that determine how a character responds when the story applies pressure. Craft is what decides whether a character hesitates or acts, bends or breaks, compromises or holds the line.

One is aspiration. The other is architecture.

***

Traditional intention-setting asks: What do I want to achieve?

Craft-based intention asks: What kind of character am I writing and what choices would make them believable?

One chases outcomes. The other establishes coherence. And coherence is what sustains us when motivation fails.

We don’t need a vision board for this. We don’t need more classes, more books, or color-coded clutter in matching bins. We need to unearth ourselves.

Small Rewrites That Change Everything: How one-sentence edits quietly reshape our lives (oh, how those changes snowball in my revisions!)

Most meaningful change doesn’t arrive as a dramatic turning point. It arrives as a line edit. In writing, a single sentence can change the entire tone of a chapter. We can shift a motivation slightly, clarify a value, remove one false note, and suddenly the character reads as truer, more coherent, and more alive. The plot hasn’t changed, but the experience of the story has.

Our lives work the same way.

We tend to imagine change as something sweeping: new systems, new identities, new declarations. Those are complete rewrites. What we want instead are developmental edits. What we’re practicing here is revision. Revision happens at the sentence level.

A one-sentence shift might sound like:

• I don’t have time for this can become This isn’t a priority right now.

• I should say yes can become I’m allowed to pause before deciding.

• I’ll do it perfectly or not at all can become I’ll do the next honest version.

These are not empty affirmations. They’re edits. They don’t ask us to believe something new. They ask us to tell our truth more precisely. Micro-decisions are how authorship becomes visible.

 And there is also to be savored how Ms. Smith applies these concepts to a philosophy of life.

sch 2/10