Key Takeaways
1. Embrace Rewriting as the Core of Novel Writing
Over the years, I’ve come to believe that revision and rewriting are most of what good writing entails: writing a successful book isn’t only making the most of the first burst of inspiration, as pleasurable as that is.
Revision is Key. Writing a novel is not just about the initial inspiration but the sustained effort of rewriting and revising. Good writing involves making a promising manuscript better, hour by hour, day by day, slowly but steadily moving it closer to your imagined ideal. This process is not merely correcting mistakes but transforming the work into something greater.
Three Drafts as Stages. The book organizes the writing process into three stages: the first draft (generative revision), the second draft (narrative revision), and the third draft (polishing revision). These drafts are not rigid steps but flexible stages where you might linger or return as needed. Each stage focuses on different aspects of the novel, from initial exploration to final polishing.
Adapt and Subvert. The advice in the book is not prescriptive but suggestive. It's okay if certain tactics don't work for you or feel at cross-purposes with the kind of novel you want to write. The aim is to help you become more yourself on the page and throughout your process. Discard what doesn't help or, better yet, subvert it.
2. Cultivate an Exploratory Mindset in the First Draft
Because what I’m trying to do in the first draft is to discover the book I’m writing by writing the book.
Exploratory Drafting. The first draft should be an exploratory draft, where you discover the story by writing it. This involves starting without a formal outline and allowing the story to emerge organically. This approach prioritizes discovery and surprise over strict adherence to a plan.
Embrace Chaos. In the earliest days of drafting, work in fragments of language and disconnected images, partial scenes and half conversations and unordered events. This chaos allows for unexpected connections and discoveries. Pay attention to inspiration filtering in from your daily life and from the books you’re reading and other media you’re consuming.
Trust the Process. Overplanning before beginning writing risks blocking opportunities for discovery and surprise. Rather than dutifully following an outline, be guided by what appears on the page as you write, by the emerging desires of characters and the dramatic demands of drafted scenes as well as by the acoustics of your sentences and the possibilities of the narrator’s voice.
3. Use Practical Tricks to Convince Yourself You're Writing a Novel
One thing to do from the very beginning of your draft, then, is to create stores of perseverance and confidence you can draw on whenever those doubts rear their heads.
Affirm Your Intention. Tell yourself you're writing a novel from the first day, stating your intention as a way of building and maintaining drive and perseverance in the face of doubt and other negative emotions. Remember that the task of any individual day is never to write a novel.
Working Title as a Guide. Attach a working title to your manuscript as soon as you can. This title will serve as a guide, reminding you of where you're heading as you inch forward through your sentences. It might also have a literal meaning plus a subtextual or symbolic one.
Enjoy the Trappings of a Book. Make your on-screen document look like a book by sticking a cover page at the beginning and inserting page numbers in the header or footer. Widen your page margins to make the page on the screen look more booklike and provide space for notes.
4. Overcome Writer's Block by Producing Inspiration
You should look at the material you produce to find your material . . . The story is always smarter than you—there will be patterns of theme, image, and idea that are much savvier and more complex than you could have come up with on your own.
Writing the Islands. If you're unsure of what comes next, try "writing the islands": write the big scenes you already know, no matter how far off they seem. Once those scenes exist on the page, the task then becomes writing between these known destinations, creating bridges to connect these islands.
Follow Your Excitement. Paying attention to your material and to your desire and enthusiasm in any given moment will spare you a lot of frustration. Writing the islands also means getting the best stuff you have so far out of your head and onto the page, making room for new best stuff to arise.
Yes, And. Be responsive to the material on the page. You write a sentence; it asserts a new reality, one that’s surprising or strange, thrilling or off-putting. Then you read the sentence again, imagining the page is your improv partner, wanting to play, to create with you, if only you’ll be agreeable to its suggestion.
5. Develop Characters Through Action and Internal Stories
You need to know the story the characters are telling themselves, and then beyond that, you have to know the story your characters are telling themselves about the stories they tell themselves.
Character Names and Physical Traits. Ground the reader in your protagonist by using their notable physical traits. In the early going of the novel, such details can also suggest a fullness of character you haven’t yet earned on the page.
Keep Characters Acting. Make a rule to keep your unnamed, unknown protagonist active: write any scene you wanted, in whatever order, as long as your protagonist was doing something that caused a change to occur, in him or in the world around him. Write down what he noticed, which taught you what he remembered and showed you what he feared.
The Stories Characters Tell Themselves. Know the story the characters are telling themselves, and then beyond that, you have to know the story your characters are telling themselves about the stories they tell themselves. There is the story of the novel’s present action, but also the stories your protagonists are telling themselves about their motives and their pasts.
6. Revisit and Reuse Settings to Deepen Narrative Resonance
When your characters return to places they’ve already been, either they or the setting needs to have changed in the interim: A woman returns to her childhood home thirty years after she left, after having been a mother and a wife, finding the house disturbingly the same.
Reuse Settings. Rather than constantly inventing new locales, send your characters through the same settings again, whenever conditions have changed, which means whenever they have new knowledge, new problems, or new desires. See what those desires look like when the protagonist is brought back to the same spaces or is confronting the same characters again, characters who might also have changed in the interim.
Change the Conditions. When your characters return to places they’ve already been, either they or the setting needs to have changed in the interim. You change either the character or the setting, then recombine them again, so the element in motion can force its more kinetic energy on the element you’ve left at rest.
Create Newness. You cannot revisit your preserved childhood home as an adult without finding the rooms too small for the person you’ve become. You cannot enter your burning childhood home and escape unchanged. Either way, something new will occur next. How could it not?
7. Employ Generative Revision Tactics for the First Draft
If you find yourself stuck or bored or unable to figure out what to do next, experiment with a single scene that isn’t working as well as you’d like by rewriting it from another point of view.
New Points of View. If you find yourself stuck or bored or unable to figure out what to do next, experiment with a single scene that isn’t working as well as you’d like by rewriting it from another point of view. Even if you change it back later, it might help you see the work anew.
Change Up Your Storytelling Modes. Your book doesn’t have to be one continuous scroll of the same mode of storytelling. If what you’re doing stops working, don’t give up before you’ve tried proceeding in a new way. A detective novel could switch from narration to police notes or evidence write-ups or forensic reports.
The Circle of the Novel. Think about the favorite physical or textual elements of books you love and then add those elements to your novel as prompts for further writing. Adding anything you love to your manuscript is a way to make you love it more, and any manuscript you love is something you’ll want to spend more time working on.
8. Rewrite, Don't Revise: The Second Draft Transformation
Only when I finish the book can I go back to the beginning and write in the voice of all that happened.
Celebrate the Rough Draft. Take the time to celebrate. Let yourself linger in your accomplishment. Writing hundreds of pages of prose is an incredible feat all its own, and in those pages is, you hope, a first version of the story you wanted to tell, populated by meaningful events in the lives of characters you’ve come to know and truly care about.
Outlining the First Draft. It’s at this stage—and never before this stage—that I write a full outline of the novel, outlining what already exists. In this document, the goal is to try to capture the main story of the novel, by which I mean the action of the book’s prime timeline.
Rewrite the Novel. I retype my second draft from scratch, rewriting as I go, moving the book I’ve already drafted toward the one described by the outline I’ve spent the last weeks or months crafting. Don’t cut and paste to save time. Instead, retype everything.
9. Layered Revision: Refusing to Be Done in the Third Draft
What you want now is to stay inside your novel as long as possible, giving yourself every chance to transform this pretty good draft into a novel that’s as great as it can be.
Refuse to Be Done. Stay inside your novel as long as possible, giving yourself every chance to transform this pretty good draft into a novel that’s as great as it can be. The activities in this chapter will give you a way to stay in the work long enough to manifest yourself upon the page not once or twice but dozens or hundreds of times.
Layered Approach. Instead of tackling every problem area or opportunity in your manuscript simultaneously, break the work into smaller tasks meant to be done one at a time, one after another. This allows you to focus on specific aspects of the novel without being overwhelmed.
Daily Manifestations. As you fill your hours and days with the work of rewriting, your fictions will not be written by any one self but by the spectrum of selves we’re always becoming, even as the novel is becoming alongside us. These daily manifestations are what makes our favorite books seem written by superhumans.
10. Edit with Both Screen and Print for Fresh Perspectives
The mode of the screen is not reading line by line but skimming or scrolling—watch someone interact with Twitter or Instagram, or pay attention to your own eyes and hands as you read an article online.
Screen vs. Print. Revising and rewriting on paper will slow you down, keep you closer to the words. It won’t be the only way you edit, but it deserves to be a part of the process. The mode of the screen is skimming or scrolling, while print allows for line-by-line reading.
Read Aloud Often. Your ear will hear what your eyes won’t see. You have to read every word when you read aloud, something you don’t have to do when reading silently on the page or the screen, where you’ll naturally skim, especially as you get overused to your own prose.
Robot-Voiced Audiobook. Use the text-to-speech function on your computer to turn your document into a robot-voiced audiobook. If you want a brutal test of how well your prose is holding up, I promise that a tone-deaf robot with pronunciation issues will be happy to give you the least generous read possible.
11. Tighten Scenes by Cutting and Reorganizing
At this stage, you want to be sure your novel’s scenes are doing the plot work you need them to do: page after page, conflicts are introduced, resolutions are sought, complications arise and are dealt with, making way for new conflicts and new complications, and so on.
Manageable Chunks. Break the prose into smaller units. This way the goal isn’t to “perfect” the entire book, only this scene, this paragraph, this sentence. All my techniques for the third draft are means of doing this: what I want more than anything is to isolate one aspect of the novel at a time, thus making the day’s goal small enough to be achievable.
Cut Opening and Closing Paragraphs. Cut the opening paragraph. Cut the last paragraph. Do that for each scene. Now rewrite the ones that have to be there, let the rest die. This works well in part because it addresses one of the most common pieces of feedback given in writing workshops.
Camera Movement. Consider how the camera or the “eye” of the scene moves the reader through the visuals on offer: Does the description begin zoomed out and then move closer in? Does it progress in a way that makes it easy for the reader to imagine?
12. Refine Prose Style Through Targeted Edits
When I write—let things be known by their real names.
Work the Verbs. Scene by scene, look at the verbs you’ve chosen: Are they the best verbs, the most active, the most surprising? Or are they more pedestrian, everyday, overly mundane? Replacing even some of the most typical verbs with more precise and interesting ones will lift the level of your prose.
Diminish Thought Tags. One category of verb you might be able to dramatically reduce are those indicating that a character is thinking: I thought, he wondered, she understood, they knew. In first-person prose, we’re already inside the character’s speech and thoughts, so these tags are usually unnecessary.
Diminish Sensory Verbs. You can also get rid of many verbs used to indicate that a character is looking at something: I saw, I looked, I watched. Cut those verbs and describe the thing being seen. Where you wrote, “she looked at the approaching car,” try “the car approached,” and so on.
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FAQ
1. What is "Refuse to Be Done" by Matt Bell about?
- Comprehensive guide to novel writing: The book is a practical, step-by-step manual for writing and rewriting a novel, structured around a three-draft process.
- Focus on revision and rewriting: Matt Bell emphasizes that most of good writing is actually rewriting, and he provides detailed strategies for each stage.
- Actionable advice for all stages: The book covers everything from starting with a blank page to final edits, offering tactics for generating, shaping, and polishing a manuscript.
- Encouragement and mindset: Bell also addresses the psychological challenges of novel writing, encouraging writers to claim their work and persist through doubt.
2. Why should I read "Refuse to Be Done" by Matt Bell?
- Practical, actionable strategies: The book is filled with concrete techniques and exercises that can be immediately applied to your writing process.
- Applicable to all writers: Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned novelist, Bell’s advice is designed to be adaptable to different genres, styles, and experience levels.
- Focus on process, not formula: Bell avoids prescriptive formulas, instead helping writers discover and refine their own unique process.
- Inspiration and motivation: The book is praised for its encouraging tone and for demystifying the daunting task of writing a novel.
3. What are the key takeaways from "Refuse to Be Done"?
- Three-draft structure: Writing a novel is best approached in three major drafts: exploratory (first), narrative revision (second), and polishing (third).
- Revision is essential: The majority of novel writing is revision and rewriting, not just initial inspiration or drafting.
- Embrace discovery: The first draft should be exploratory and open to surprise, rather than rigidly planned.
- Layered, focused revision: Later drafts should break revision into manageable, focused tasks, improving the manuscript in layers.
4. How does Matt Bell’s three-draft method work in "Refuse to Be Done"?
- First Draft – Exploratory: Focus on generating material, discovering the story, and writing without overplanning or self-censorship.
- Second Draft – Narrative Revision: After a break, outline what you have, analyze structure, and rewrite the novel from scratch, guided by a new, improved plan.
- Third Draft – Polishing: Conduct layered, targeted revisions, focusing on prose, scene structure, dialogue, and cutting unnecessary material.
- Iterative and flexible: Bell notes that these “drafts” are really stages, and writers may move back and forth between them as needed.
5. What specific advice does Matt Bell give for starting a novel in "Refuse to Be Done"?
- Claim your project: Affirm to yourself that you are writing a novel, and give it a working title early to make it feel real.
- Write an exploratory draft: Begin without a rigid outline, allowing the story, characters, and world to emerge through writing.
- Set manageable goals: Use daily or weekly word count or time-based goals to build momentum and confidence.
- Embrace imperfection: Don’t worry about writing perfect sentences or scenes in the first draft; focus on generating material.
6. How does "Refuse to Be Done" recommend handling revision and rewriting?
- Rewrite, don’t just revise: For the second draft, Bell advocates retyping the entire manuscript from scratch, using the first draft as a guide.
- Outline after drafting: Only after the first draft is complete should you outline what you have, to see the story’s structure and identify what needs changing.
- Focus on big-picture changes: Use the second draft to address plot, character arcs, and structure, not just line edits.
- Break revision into layers: In the third draft, tackle one aspect at a time—such as dialogue, prose style, or scene order—to avoid overwhelm.
7. What are some of the most useful generative and revision tactics in "Refuse to Be Done"?
- Writing the islands: Write the big, exciting scenes you know, then connect them later, rather than writing strictly in order.
- Yes, and approach: Build on what’s already on the page, treating your draft as an improv partner to generate new material.
- Remove the boring bits: Regularly cut or rewrite any passages that bore you, and keep a “cut file” for discarded material.
- Use highlighting and color-coding: Print out your manuscript and use highlighters to identify explanations, backstory, weak sentences, and strong sentences for targeted revision.
8. How does Matt Bell address the psychological challenges of novel writing in "Refuse to Be Done"?
- Normalize doubt and perseverance: Bell acknowledges that oscillating between confidence and doubt is normal for novelists.
- Encourages self-kindness: He stresses the importance of forgiving yourself for imperfect drafts and focusing on progress over perfection.
- Celebrate milestones: The book recommends celebrating the completion of each draft and taking breaks to gain perspective.
- Refuse to be done: Bell’s core philosophy is to persist through fatigue and resistance, pushing the novel as far as it can go before declaring it finished.
9. What are Matt Bell’s recommendations for improving prose style in "Refuse to Be Done"?
- Work the verbs: Replace generic verbs with more precise, vivid ones, except in dialogue tags where “said” and “asked” are usually best.
- Reduce thought and sensory tags: Cut unnecessary “I thought,” “I saw,” and similar phrases to make prose more immediate.
- Vary sentence and paragraph length: Create rhythm and drama by mixing short and long sentences and paragraphs.
- Eliminate weasel words: Search for and remove filler words like “just,” “really,” “suddenly,” and others that weaken prose.
10. How does "Refuse to Be Done" suggest handling structure, scenes, and chapters?
- Scene-level focus: Break the manuscript into scenes and revise each for clarity, tension, and efficiency.
- Cut openings and closings: Try removing the first and last paragraphs of scenes to see if the scene starts or ends more strongly.
- Rearrange for tension: Experiment with the order of scenes and chapters to maximize suspense and narrative drive.
- Flexible chaptering: There’s no ideal chapter length; instead, consider the needs of your story, pacing, and reader experience.
11. What are the best quotes from "Refuse to Be Done" and what do they mean?
- “Refuse to be done.” – The book’s central mantra, urging writers to persist in revision and not settle for “good enough.”
- “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.” (Karen Russell, quoted) – Highlights the endurance and challenge of novel writing.
- “When in doubt, rewrite instead of revise.” – Bell’s advice to favor rewriting whole sections over tinkering with existing text.
- “You write your way through a field of pebbles, looking for seeds.” (Jane Smiley, quoted) – Encourages writers to accept that not every sentence will be great, but some will grow into the heart of the novel.
12. What makes "Refuse to Be Done" by Matt Bell different from other writing craft books?
- Revision-centered approach: Unlike many craft books that focus on inspiration or outlining, Bell’s is built around the reality that most of writing is rewriting.
- Step-by-step, layered process: The book offers a clear, repeatable method for moving from draft to draft, with specific tactics for each stage.
- Adaptable to any genre or style: Bell’s advice is not prescriptive; he encourages writers to take only what’s useful and adapt it to their own process.
- Focus on the writer’s growth: The book emphasizes that the process of writing and revising a novel changes the writer, not just the manuscript.
Review Summary
Refuse to Be Done receives high praise for its practical advice on novel writing. Reviewers appreciate its concise structure, encouraging tone, and actionable strategies for drafting and revising. Many find it useful for both beginners and experienced writers, highlighting its focus on the rewriting process. Some readers note that certain techniques may not suit everyone's writing style. Overall, the book is commended for its motivational approach and valuable insights into the novel-writing journey, with many readers planning to apply its methods to their own work.
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