What I’m learning as I revise is the necessity of focusing on the story. It’s so easy to convolute a narrative with witticisms and tangents and humorous bantering and postmodern twists and complex characterization and inner workings and streams of consciousness, and add it all together, and most likely, you’ve failed to tell a story. The more I’ve cut my baby to pieces and sacrificed funny jokes here and there, the overall work becomes both funnier and, best of all, an actual story as opposed to a hodepodge of would-be literature.