Flexing your writing muscles? It's time to work on ARMS

Okay, let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, that’s “ARMS” in all caps. So if you’ve guessed there’s a fun acronym coming up, you’re right! If you didn’t, that’s fine—unless it’s because you don’t think acronyms are any fun at all, in which case you’re wrong about this one. Any acronym that helps me in my writing is automatically fun.

Last week, I mentioned how to approach revisions if you’re feeling intimidated by the scope of the work that’s still left. If breaking up your chapter, story, etc. into aspects like plot or characterization still leaves you with tasks that feel overwhelming, here’s another thing I like to do: analyze the work ahead using ARMS.

If you haven’t heard of ARMS before, it’s a very simple approach to revision that reminds you what you can do with any troublesome draft:

• A: Add

• R: Remove

• M: Move

• S: Substitute

That’s it. That’s really all you can do when you’re revising a piece. Of course, it’s much harder to put into practice, but it does help demystify the revision process if it seems too big and opaque to tackle all at once. I’ve presented this acronym to my freshman composition students and in my writing workshops, and while I can’t speak for the workshop attendees since I don't read their work, I can say it helped my beginner writing students a lot.

It also helps a lot if you’re working on a unique project; it can make you grow by leaps and bounds as a writer, but it’s also hard to find books that are similar to yours that you can learn from. I’m in that boat right now as I’m revising my novel. It has a fairly traditional structure, but the satirical tone and the community it’s about aren’t often found in literature, especially not together, and as I go, I’ve had to teach myself a lot about the novel I’m crafting. It’s one of those challenging-but-rewarding types of things whose appeal isn’t obvious to people who haven’t chosen to do something like this but is very obvious to people who enjoy exploring.

And that’s really what revision should be: exploring. It’s easy to forget that if you’re neck deep in a draft you don’t understand, when you’re telling yourself, “I should know this by now! I’ve written other stuff before. Why isn’t this coming together?” But the thing is, you’ve never written this before. No one has. That’s where the whole “teaching yourself about your current novel” thing comes into play.

So next week, I’ll start sharing how I’ve used each of these revision methods in my own work in a way that helped my process and made it easier to wade into a new draft. We’ll get into Add first. As we go through the letters, see if you can incorporate them into your own writing process and use them to your advantage.