ARMS: Moving

Adding to and removing from your WIP are both pretty straightforward (and if not, you can always go back to the last couple posts on this blog). But moving can be a little less clear. If you’ve forgotten a plot point, you have to add it in revision, and if your writing tends to be wordy, you know you have to cut back. But how do you know when to utilize the M part of the ARMS acronym?

Here are some clues that some aspect of your story may need to be moved around:

When you start your story too early. “Too early” doesn’t mean “has a Dickensian amount of backstory” if the writer is actually Dickens. But contemporary writing tends to have a closer focus on plot or at least a tightly focused central theme. If your story drags in the beginning, picks up the pace on page 50, and keeps a high level of interest until the end, your story’s true beginning is probably on or around page 50.

When you start your story too late. I’ve seen this less often in rough drafts, but sometimes a story starts too late. This is often the case when the story adds big chunks of backstory after it’s started. I'm talking about not just one pivotal scene but several, which can create confusion rather than seeming like a fascinating mystery to unravel. In such cases, the story may need to begin sooner.

When your backstory or the unraveling of a mystery needs to be spread out and paced better. If you find yourself thinking, “Okay, I need to just tell the reader all of XYZ so they can understand everything,” you may have an information dump on your hands. When this happens, consider ways you can divide up the reveal and place its parts throughout all or part of your novel. On a side note, a lot of backstory can be cut, especially if you’re a beginning writer. Let a trusted friend read a draft in which you’ve culled ninety percent of the backstory; you may be surprised by the positive reaction.

When the events of a chapter make more sense somewhere else. Recently I realized I could save a lot of words (which was great, since my current draft is way longer than it needs to be) if I moved an important discovery three chapters earlier. That one move allowed me to cut a lot of unnecessary fluff in between, tightening the pace of the novel.

When your gut tells you something’s working but not in its current spot. Listen to your gut. It doesn’t always have the right fix, but it’s almost always right when it thinks something’s a problem. As I’ve said before, you don’t need to worry about making irreversible mistakes in a draft if you save all your drafts as you go, including the ones that (you think) are dead ends.

When you need to merge or divide a character. This last one isn’t about plot but about the people enacting the plot, and it can also be used as an example of next week's revision tactic, substitution. In my own work, I’ve turned two sisters into one, and I’ve turned a mother and an aunt into one figure. In both cases, one character was redundant, one sister not doing much and the aunt doing the same kinds of things the mother did. If you’re wondering if a character should be two different people (this has also happened to me, although the example was so extreme I had to save one character for another story entirely), ask yourself, “Is this person acting in very contradictory ways without a very good reason?”

Remember, whenever you move something, it’s going to impact the rest of your book. It’s like when you copy and paste in a document; you may have to capitalize something, remove a period, and make other changes so the move becomes seamless. So for all of the above, don’t simply move the passage in question and leave it. Be sure it now fits into your book the way you want it to.