ARMS: Substituting

In revision, sometimes you’ll find you need to substitute one thing for another. This is a little different from moving, which I discussed last week. When you move something from one spot in your WIP to another, you’ll have to make some small changes so it looks like what you moved has always been in its new spot, but the thing itself hasn’t undergone a huge change. With substitution, you’re

• removing something that isn’t working as well as you’d like,

• considering what it was that you wanted that thing to do, and

• replacing it with something that does fulfill that function you intended.

So it’s sort of like addition and removal together, but it deserves to be mentioned as its own category because, if you used only addition or only removal, you’d end up with a very different result in your WIP—one you probably wouldn’t like very much if what you really need is the add-remove combination of substitution.

Here are some common scenarios in which a substitution or two can make a huge difference in your next draft.

When you need to show some emotion that your current scene either isn’t showing or shows in an uninteresting way. Perhaps you want the scene in question to show how much your protagonist cares about her new boyfriend, so you take them on a nice trip to the aquarium, where they hold hands as they stare at the guppies and make plans to get ice cream afterward. But you notice that the scene doesn’t have much tension; your main character doesn’t really have a goal in this moment because she’s so happy, and the trip to the aquarium doesn’t really have much to do with the next scene, when they have a big fight. If you opt to replace the aquarium trip with a scene in which he was supposed to pick her up two hours ago, hasn’t texted, and isn’t answering his phone, if you show her alternating between worry about what might have happened and anger about his insensitivity (they were supposed to go to the aquarium, after all, and this is the second date he’s forgotten about!), you’re using substitution in your revision. You’re keeping the emotion you want to show—your protagonist’s care for her boyfriend—while increasing the tension and therefore the reader’s interest.

When you need to get your characters from Point A to Point B, but the journey doesn’t make sense in terms of their motivation. Maybe, in that fight with her boyfriend, your protagonist says that she really wanted to go to the aquarium and can’t understand why he’s flaked on her twice now—and he reveals that he had a traumatic experience at that same aquarium when he fell in the guppy tank. Next thing you know, they’re both at the aquarium because you need them to be there—but the poor boyfriend really has no reason to go, does he? The good news is, if the boyfriend has “told” you, the writer, why he’s avoiding the aquarium, he’s about to let you in on what will get him there if you keep listening.

When you need a character to serve a certain role, but the character you currently have in that role isn’t working out. Let’s say you need more than just guppies to terrify your boyfriend character before the story begins. After all, guppies aren’t that scary all on their own. Now, guppies with a pirate, or a scuba diver hiding in the tank, or a tourist who was sneaking around the aquarium after hours for no good reason? All potentially scary.

Fortunately, substitution gives us a lot of leeway in revision. It allows us to look at our big-picture goals and see if we can come up with a better way to reach them. And if we take a step back and think about what it is that we really want to accomplish, separating ourselves from the details of the current draft for the time being, we can often find a better way to bring our WIP closer to our vision for it.