How to Edit Yourself, Weave Timelines, and Keep Going When You're Lost in the Middle

Structure is the writer’s most underrated tool. Here’s how I use index cards and detective fiction to help me edit my work.

Thanks for all your questions for this installation of Office Hours! I was heartened by how many of you asked about editing, revision, and structure—unglamorous but essential parts of writing. Anyone who’s taken a workshop with me knows that I believe learning how structure works—especially reading closely for structure in its more intuitive forms—is the key to becoming a better and more successful writer.

I haven’t tackled everyone’s question yet. I’ll do another post soon on all these questions as they apply to poetry, as well as one on submitting pitches and pieces, organizing writing time, research for a trade book, and much more. But here is a start: some thoughts on how I think through these issues in my own projects and as a magazine editor. (The deeper dive—complete with index cards, Nancy Drew, and the messy middle—is for paying subscribers. Writing these posts takes time away from my own writing, so thank you for supporting them.)

How to revise…

Where do you start building a piece or a book?

Early in a project, I generate material and read widely around it, jotting notes by hand and on my phone. I’m listening for the question I’m really asking, or for a crisper formulation of what interests me—what I want to try to say whether explicitly (in essays and criticism), or more metaphorically (in poems or lyric essays).

As scenes and beats emerge, I start thinking about structure. For a book-length project, I sketch an outline in Google Docs and break out my favorite organizational tool: colored index cards. Each color has a function: yellow might be the present-day thread; green, an alternate narrative line; blue, the research points I don’t want to neglect; orange, the hard-won formulations or metaphors that feel like keystones. Spreading them across my office floor lets me see the whole.

In a first draft, I’m focused simply on generating, taking risks, and having some fun—if I’m not interested in what I’m writing, no one else will be.

When I have a draft of some kind, I work on structure: pacing, tone, transitions. Years ago, while writing New Yorker piece about Nancy Drew’s inventor, Edward Stratemeyer, I learned that he instructed his ghostwriters to end every chapter with an exclamation point or a question mark. That simple trick trained young readers to keep turning the pages. Since then, I’ve thought about suspense and propulsion as key elements of even literary nonfiction. While writing The Invisible Kingdom, I ended each section with a realization or question to propel the reader into the next. Detective fiction, funnily enough, helped me structure a book about chronic illness, where I was concerned that readers might flag during long sections of research.

Next are more specific some answers to your questions — things that I think every writer should understand about revision and self-editing. Your support allows me to write these posts—thank you.