In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 261.
Kurt Vonnegut has this wonderful lecture on YouTube showing how he charts the emotional journey of Cinderella. She starts low, stuck at home and acting as a servant to her stepmother and evil stepsisters. Her emotional chart goes high at the ball as she dances with the prince, and then when the clock strikes midnight it sinks lower, lower, lower—gong, gong, gong—until she’s guttered and back to being a maid at home, now with an added layer of heartbreak.
I’ll admit, it’s a little silly to chart something as subjective as a story against something as analytical as an X and Y axis. But doing so can also be very helpful as we consider revisions in our prose.
Whether it’s mapping the main character’s energy or doing something so old-fashioned as tracing Freytag’s pyramid to map the arc of the plot, if a story has movement, there are going to be peaks and valleys as you chart its shape. There are going to be slopes rising up, and hopefully some coming down, too, because even a happy ending rarely results from a straight line. There might be a cliff—drops nearly straight down are an accepted storytelling convention; sudden ascents are often a sign you’re missing an intermediate scene, or at least an indication you might need to explain the elevator that popped your character right to the top. And an extended flat line? Finding one of those typically means there’s not enough change in a story, whether in plot, character, or emotional tenor.
At a certain point in the revision process, whether coaching my students or staring at my own manuscript, I often encourage these lines to be pushed and pulled and nudged. Most of the time it’s to increase the amplitude. Remember that term from math class? Per Merriam-Webster: “the maximum departure of the value of an alternating current or wave from the average value.” I ask, “Can we push up that peak to something closer to euphoria? What about when something bad happens: Might it be even worse, more devastating? What if your character doesn’t let cooler heads prevail but instead goes fully off the rails?” I’ll admit that when I dispense this kind of advice, I can feel a bit hackish. It’s a Hollywood cliché to ask, “What is at stake?” But it’s also fundamental, because what I’m often really asking is, “Have you made the story consequential enough?”
Of course, this works the other way too—sometimes your swings are too big, and risk giving your readers a rollercoaster-esque level of whiplash. Revising Clutch, my new novel, was the first time in my writerly memory I had to manipulate my story downward, intentionally lowering the amplitude. A brutal act became less and less brutal through revision…though I’ve been told by readers who don’t know a thing about the revision journey that it still packs sufficient punch. Because that’s the other thing about these manipulations, whether you’re going bigger or downshifting: As externally imposed as they might feel at the time adjustment, if you do these manipulations thoughtfully and with care, at the end, it won’t feel manufactured, but instead—just right.
Emily Nemens is the author of Clutch (Tin House, February 2026). Her debut novel, The Cactus League (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Literary Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, the Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Nemens spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading the Paris Review and serving as coeditor and prose editor of the Southern Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College and lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.
image credit: Augustine Wong