Before I started self-publishing my children’s books, I taught writing across the nation in a Novel Revision Retreat. To attend the retreat, writers needed a full draft of the novel, and we spent the weekend talking about how to revise their story.
The results were great! One author attended the retreat, went home and revised, and sold her novel in ten days flat. That story, Hattie, Big Sky, by Kirby Larson went on to win a Newbery Honor, the highest award for children’s literature in the U.S. Kirby graciously wrote the forward to my book, NOVEL METAMORPHOSIS: Uncommon Ways to Revise.
Which I’m revising now, part of the refresh of books for the recent Kickstarter about PUBLISH: Find Surprising Success Self-Publishing Your Children’s Books. As part of the Novel Metamorphosis refresh, I am adding a link to a video about my Shrunken Manuscript technique—this post!
What is the Shrunken Manuscript Technique?
One of my teaching goals is to make things visible whenever possible. Seeing the Big Picture of a novel is hard, though, because it’s spread over 100+ manuscript pages. How do you see what is so spread out? With the magic of today’s computers, there’s no reason for it to be so spread out!
Instructions for Darcy Pattison’s Shrunken Manuscript Technique
1. Open your manuscript in your word processor. Take out the chapter breaks, so there is no white space between chapters.
2. Single space the entire mss.
3. Reduce the font of the mss until the mss takes up about 30 pages, usually 8 pt or 6 pt. This is arbitrary, of course, but I find that I can see about 30 pages at a time. It doesn’t matter if the font is readable; you’re trying to shrink the mss so you can mark certain things and you won’t be reading it but evaluating how these things fit into the big picture. If your mss runs over 40,000 words, you can try putting it into two columns in order for it to fit into 30 pages. If your mss is over 50,000 words, you may need to divide it into two sections and evaluate 30-shrunken pages at a time.
4. Use a bright, wide marker and put an X over the strongest chapters identified the Inventory.
5. Lay out the mss pages on the floor in about three rows of ten. (Adjust layout to your page count, of course.)
6. Stand back and evaluate. What does this visualization tell you about the revisions needed? One typical thing to notice is that the strong chapters occur near the front and the end of the story: this type manuscript has the dreaded Sagging Middle. Sometimes there is strong scene in the middle, but it’s very short: the proportions are off here, with the majority of the text in the weaker chapters.
Enjoy! Using the Shrunken Manuscript makes this huge thing—a full-length novel—manageable. It’s easy to see where and why it needs revision.