Cutting and Expanding
The vast majority of revision work entails either expanding passages that further your piece’s heartbeat and cutting those that don’t—the old Michelangelo story about chipping away all the marble that’s not the angel. Both activities are guided by discernment. In spiritual circles, discernment means careful listening for what the Quakers call way. What path is opening before me now? What is my calling? What is right action in this situation? How might I be true to myself and my beliefs? In revision, discernment is also about deep listening. What is this piece really about? What might it want to become? Can I reach another level of truth-telling here? In other words, what pumps life into this creative work and how can I, its author, help this life emerge most fully? Pay close attention to the act of revision and you’ll get all sorts of insights about real-life discernment. Writing asks…
Welcoming the Audience
Last month I wrote about the importance of dismissing the audience for the sake of creating a safe, private space where we can take creative risks. The corollary to this, equally valuable, is that for writing to flourish we must at some point welcome the audience. If a writer only considers the self the primary audience, the work becomes solipsistic and sloppy. Our own minds, however bright, are only so big; our own lives, however expansive, are inevitably limited. When we write solely for ourselves, as we do in a private journal, we human beings have a propensity to navel-gaze and obsess. Unedited journals almost never get published for this reason; there’s simply too much shlock for most readers. If we never consider an audience as we write, our work’s growth remains stunted. The discipline of considering the reader is absolutely necessary to the development of creative work. All art…
Dismissing the Audience
“You must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” When I came upon these words in Strunk and White’s classic writing handbook, Elements of Style, I felt pleased as punch. For years I’ve tried to convince writing students to surround themselves with a safe, protective bubble as they draft projects and begin revising. We all know how concern for our audience can loom over our shoulders, pestering us with questions like “What will your mother think?” and “Who will give a rat’s ass about that?” and presuming judgments about the inadequacy of our language or ideas or even our very impulse to write. As soon as we allow that dreaded entity, “Audience”,…
Mapping the Story
No matter how much we know about our story’s content when we begin a creative project (be it fiction or creative nonfiction), unknowns lurk around every corner and it’s best, I believe, to think of our material as an untamed wilderness. If we assume we know this territory, we close ourselves off to the possibility of discovery. The reader’s experience will be adventurous only if the writer has embarked on a true journey, fraught with risk and vulnerability and mystery. And so we begin with some direction and the desire to address certain, known topics, all the while staying open to surprise. Peter Turchi is interested in maps as a metaphor for story. Just as a map is an encoded representation of a real landscape, the printed story is an encoded representation of the human experience. Turchi writes, “If we attempt to map the world of a story before we…
Adding by Subtraction
I recently led a manuscript review for a second draft of a book-length memoir. As often happens at this stage, the class discussed what the book was about at its core, helping the author articulate its purpose and drive, and then named the thematic threads that unify the many disparate stories. Some of these themes were surprising to the author, most confirmed her intentions or instincts, and all needed development. The class wanted more: more reflection, more anecdotes that supported her primary exploration, more links between the narrative and the various questions the narrative raised. Her manuscript was already a good 250+ pages, so I wasn’t surprised when she cornered me afterward and asked, “How can I possibly make all these changes without the book getting ridiculously long?” I share her question because every manuscript goes through this stage. The author has plenty of material. The outer stories are complete…
Motif
I just finished rereading Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter for a class I’m teaching, and one of Hampl’s techniques I was most impressed with was her use of the recurring motif. These images, references, and anecdotes crop up repeatedly through her memoir and serve to bind her otherwise wandering reflections together; they become a structural element, unifying the narrative. I’d like to briefly look at three examples. The first is quite small: Hampl’s repeated references to Scott Fitzgerald. Hampl’s memoir haunts what she calls “Old St. Paul,” and so her great love of Scott Fitzgerald’s work helps both to illuminate the setting and reveal her literary obsession. Fitzgerald never becomes more than a passing reference, but his name is like a bell rung periodically throughout her story. The reader thinks, “Oh yes! Here we are again.” The second example is a photograph of her young parents at a picnic. She…
Movement
When I teach personal essay writing, many students are surprised to learn that essays needn’t make a point or answer a question. An essay may ask a question, explore it, and arrive at a better way to ask the question. What makes an essay work is movement. Readers need to arrive at a different place from where we were launched. I’ve come to understand movement as fundamental to all good literature. In an essay, movement may happen in the realm of ideas; in fiction or memoir, movement happens in character and plot; in poetry, movement occurs in an aesthetic or in the poet’s relationship to the topic. Movement is the reason we read. We want to be transported from one way of being into another, and to emerge from the book changed, however slightly. For this reason, much of revision’s work is identifying and amplifying transformation within the text. What…
Reflective Writing
The best literature revolves around a central core of an idea or emotion—what I like to call the heartbeat. The heartbeat pumps life into every artery and vein of a story. It unifies. It doesn’t prevent the inclusion of other themes and motifs, but it does rise to prominence. This heartbeat almost never reveals itself during a first draft. Our work during revision involves looking for hints of this heartbeat and drawing them forward. One helpful technique for doing this is to write with the voice of a distanced narrator. Rather than immersing yourself in the character who is your younger self (the former you, who experienced the events of your story), step back and reflect. What do you make of these events today? Why are you sharing them? What’s at stake for you? What might be at stake for your reader? Whether or not these reflections get included in…
The Thingness of Writing
When writers, and especially memoir writers, first begin generating a manuscript, we often understand our words to be extensions of our deepest self. What we’ve written is an external manifestation of our very being. Our identity is bound up in the black print of our creation—and rightly so. This level of over-identification helps invest our words with drive and passion. The best writing emerges when the author’s very being is at stake. Writers are often private about these early jottings; they feel too close, too vulnerable, too precious. First drafts are almost always raw, both in their language and their emotion. Some writers feel they’ve bled on the page, or spilled their guts. There are no boundaries between writer and what’s written. Compare this to a final draft we send to the publisher, or to the print version that arrives in the reader’s hands. Unlike a diary, which never meets…
Revision’s Biggest Hurdle
Here’s a common scenario with intermediate creative nonfiction writers: They’ve gotten over the initial hurdles to writing true stories—fear of what others will think, mistrust of their memories, difficulties establishing the writing habit—and they’ve experienced the rush of elation that comes with drafting. They may have even dabbled in revision and overcome their resistance to meddling with their first words. They’ve fleshed out scenes, added dialogue, paid attention to character development; they’ve fiddled with craft and made worthy changes. But at some point, all creative nonfiction writers (and, I would argue, writers of all literary genres) must seriously consider revising their content as well as their craft. Revision is not simply about evaluating and changing the form of our work; it’s also about adding layers of insight to the content. And when our content is the material of our lives, this means doing serious emotional work. Most writing students quit…