Review: Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell

There are many books about how to write fiction, but only a handful focused on revision. I’m happy to have another one to recommend to writers (alongside Sandra Scofield’s excellent The Last Draft) because I agree with Matt Bell that “revision and rewriting are most of what good writing entails.” Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts hammers home two messages—rewrite rather than revise, and refuse to be done—while also providing a method for doing the work and a menu of tactics and strategies to apply to your manuscript.

As the title suggests, Bell offers a three-draft structure for your writing and revision work. The goal for the first draft is simply to get it done any way you can. When working on his own novels, Bell tells himself that “the first draft isn’t the book I’m writing, only a sort of one-to-one scale model of it, not the novel itself but an idea of what the novel could be.” To create that scale model, Bell encourages you to write an “exploratory draft,” arguing that “overplanning before beginning writing risks blocking opportunities for discovery and surprise.”

Most of the advice in this section focuses on process rather than craft, with tips and tricks to help you keep going. For example, he suggests adopting the “yes, and” method used in improv comedy. Write a sentence that “asserts a new reality,” then apply the yes, and move to “build upon it, encouraging the story the sentence suggests.” I also like his suggestion to adopt the scenario-planning framework used by organizations, as described by Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker: “You build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.” Asking yourself what each of those scenarios might look like can be a way to find new inspiration for your plot or character arcs.

To create his second draft, Bell starts by making a reverse outline of the first draft. This is a step I heartily endorse—it’s the starting point of my developmental editing work and my Novel Study analytical work. (Here’s my story spreadsheet template you can use for your own reverse outline.) He then steps back and evaluates the structure, paying close attention to plot beats, character arcs, and cause-and-effect chains.

The how of these steps is a little fuzzy; Bell sometimes offers tests to apply to your manuscript, without always telling you how to solve the problems you find. I’d encourage you to supplement your own story structure work here with additional craft reading. Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, and Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story are three books I frequently recommend to writers; all of them offer advice and analytical techniques that will be useful for this stage.

After creating a new story outline that will guide the shape of the revision, Bell starts the second draft from scratch, using the first draft as a guide but typing every sentence anew. He argues that “the trick of the second draft is to recapture or re-create the magic that inspired the novel in the first place, but to do so with the fullness of the style you developed by the time you reached the end” and notes that this method is used by many award-winning and bestselling authors.

The third draft then is devoted to transforming a good second draft into “a novel that’s as great as it can be.” I think this chapter is the most useful of the book, full of concrete, practical exercises that each require a separate revision pass. For example, Bell advocates for a pass focused solely on setting: “In each scene, 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? A default mode of movement might be top to bottom, left to right, big to small, moving as your eyes might move, taking in a new room or a new location.”

Throughout the book, Bell argues for the benefit of having a rich, varied “art life,” which includes reading the work of other authors—something I’ve argued for as well in my Novel Study books. As he notes, “The writers I know who seem to be the most ‘original’ or ‘innovative’ often turn out to be the most diverse readers. It’s not that they’re without influence; it’s that they’re influenced by so many writers and styles and genres that it’s difficult to separate any individual voice from the final synthesis.” If you are anxious about being overly influenced by the voice of another author, the solution is to add more voices rather than subtract that one.

As you have likely gathered, Bell’s methods are not built for speed and his overall orientation is toward literary fiction, despite a mention of commercial and genre fiction in his introduction. He notes that his own first and second drafts generally each take him a year to complete, and then many of the techniques he uses during the third draft can require additional weeks or months.

But the result, he argues, isn’t just a higher-quality book but also a book that is richer, fuller, more abundant: “As we fill our hours and days with the work of rewriting, our 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.” I find this idea inspiring—that your best work will also be a distillation of your own best selves, glowing like a lantern at the center of your book.*

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