Discovering Character and Theme through Revision

The “Now What?” Months are here to guide you through the editing, revision, and publishing processes! Every novel is the “after” picture to the first draft’s “before”. Today, Jason W. LaPier, author of the  forthcoming Unexpected Rain , shares how he perfected character arcs and discovered theme while revising his NaNo-novel:

The first draft: At the end of November 2009, I had a big wad of words, fifty thousand in number. I’d attempted to write novels before, but it wasn’t until NaNoWriMo that I’d managed to complete one. I was so awash in my victory; naturally, I assumed that my first draft was perfection.

Until other people read it.

I had played by the rules: I had an outline, wrote without editing, wrote every day, and got from word zero to word fifty-thousand-something. Still, I had some gaps to fill. And since I was writing science fiction, I had plenty of info-dumping exposition to excise, creating more gaps. So for me, it was important to approach the next step by thinking in terms of “revision”, not just “editing.”

This is a key distinction, because instinctively, I wanted to go through the whole thing and line-edit sentences into sparkling diamonds. Cut out the sore spots and let the best shine through. But that’s editing: up close. In revision, what you’re really doing is stepping back…

The makeover: I had started NaNoWriMo with an outline, so a natural first step was to revisit that. Pantser or plotter, I think that after the first draft is complete, it’s an excellent time to go back and create or update that outline.

The next step was to look at my characters. After 50K words. I really felt like I knew them—which is to say I thought I knew their personalities. Feedback from my first readers was swift and brutal: “We hate these people.”

It was a challenge. ‘What do you mean,’ I thought, ‘I love these people!’ But I started by adding layers: balancing strengths with weaknesses, tweaking faults to be more endearing than annoying. After one workshop I attended, I had an epiphany about how television and film had adversely affected the way I wrote characters, and with some analysis, I could see what needed to be fixed.

Aside from personality work, I needed to take a long hard look at the characters’ arcs:

Who were they before the story, where did they come from?
During the story, at what times were they faced with challenges, those “change or die” moments?
How were they different at the end than they were at the beginning?

These questions allowed me to deepen my characters.

And finally, combining what I learned about my plot and my characters, I hit upon what I call “theme discovery”. Some believe that theme is reserved for literary writing, but I see its place in all genres. In my case, I didn’t want to force theme, but I wanted to be open to it. When I found a few key themes, boy did I grab on. I went back to that outline and those arcs and reinforced those structures with the glue of theme. I truly believe that glue is what turns a Pretty Good Story into a Great Story. Readers don’t have to know themes are present, but they’ll notice, because everything fits together.

The final product: A novel is a process. Every change, every cut, only serves to make the novel stronger. The first draft is not the novel it was meant to be; only through process does it become the novel it was meant to be. Don’t fight the process, embrace it!

Jason W. LaPier is a multi-genre writer, delving into science fiction, speculative fiction, horror, slipstream, literary fiction, and surrealism. His debut novel was born during NaNoWriMo and will be published by Harper Voyager on May 7th, 2015. Unexpected Rain is a space-age noir murder mystery and is the first in a trilogy. Jason now lives in Portland, OR with his wife and their dachshund. He is always in search of the perfect Italian sandwich.