Lost Soul: The Process of Revision in Fiction

My aim in this thesis is to investigate the process of revision through focus upon my own work. To this end, I am presenting one of my short stories in three different stages of revision: a first draft, a heavily restructured middle draft, and a current final draft. The story, “Lost Soul,” follows a teenage boy’s trek through the wintry woods on an unknown mission for a dark creature simply called the Gloom. The progression between drafts is drastic and allows me to highlight different methods of revision, namely working with an editor, sharing with a workshop group, and self-revising. Comparison of early and final drafts of published works, namely Kali VanBaale’s The Good Divide and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, serves to put the revision process into a larger context beyond my own work. Techniques from craft books such as Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story and Bret Anthony Johnston’s Naming the World give further background to the various methods used. My results in working with the aforementioned methods express that the combination of the three creates a more balanced and precisely written final draft than any method would individually. Testing the varying success of each method has determined that these methods, in conjunction, hold potential for revision of my future writing.