ARMS: Adding

Last week, I introduced the acronym ARMS—adding, removing, moving, and substituting—as a way to delve into the often confusing process of revision. ARMS can make revision seem much more manageable when you’re feeling overwhelmed; after all, you ultimately have only these four things on your to-do list. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the first item: adding.

Some writers (and editors) don’t like this one much, at least not in large quantities. After all, the thinking goes, a rough draft should have all of your uncensored thoughts on the page so you can work with them in the second draft. It’s like sculpting with clay; you may remove or adjust the clay, but generally you gather all your clay before beginning. And if you’re already at the stage when you’re sending your writing to agents or editors, it helps to think about this—and any other writing-related topic—from their perspective. If your manuscript is too sparse and they need you to add something, they don’t know up front what they’re getting, if your vision for the addition is the same as theirs, or even if you’re capable of pulling off whatever it is they’re requesting. If they need you to edit out a subplot, they can be much more confident that you can make that type of change.

But, of course, there are times when you do need to add to your manuscript in the second, third, or even tenth draft. Obviously, you don’t want to neglect a good idea that you didn’t have earlier simply because it would require you to add a subplot or chapter or character. And in that case, you might be kicking yourself for not thinking of that great idea earlier so you could have done more of the work up front. But the thing is, ideas in writing often need time to percolate. They don’t just come to you all at once for you to dump into a messy pile on the pages of your rough draft.

I’ve been dealing with that recently in my own WIP. One problem I tend to have in my manuscripts is a messy middle; I’ll know the beginning and most of the end, but I don’t have the middle fleshed out. As I write the rough draft and get to know my characters better, I learn what’s driving them and what would make them do the drastic things they would never have considered in Chapter One but that they desperately need to do by Chapter Ten. And now that I’m revising this particular WIP, I can see that the tension between my protagonist and her brother that was organically present in the first draft—when I had absolutely no idea why I couldn’t make him talk to her—was because she inadvertently betrayed him a year before the novel’s beginning. And when I first started this WIP, I had no idea that it would take that kind of turn.

Of course, some of you may find it hard to relate to this kind of writing process. It may seem ridiculous to let made-up characters “tell” you what their problems are and “demand” to have their way in solving them. Yet as readers, we all have a sense of when a book is working well, when we’re caught up in the flow of events and prose and have no idea how the author is doing what they’re doing, only we know it’s going excellently. This is because a lot of what makes a novel work well is psychology—and if you know a little about Freud, you know that a large part of human psychology is the unconscious. Things we’ve stored in our unconscious are tremendously valuable, but they don’t just rise to the surface of their own accord; we have to convince them to, by continually returning to our writing and pondering the problems we’ve created for ourselves and our characters.

So adding is definitely a valuable part of the revision process. Just try to add in all the important elements before shopping your manuscript around.