Playing with Revision
The more I revise and the more I help new writers learn to revise, the more I’m convinced that good revision, like any good writing, is essentially play. Robin Marantz Henig’s recent article in the New York Times , “Taking Play Seriously,” looks at recent scientific studies that ask, What is play’s role in the evolution of species? Of course there are many theories, but here is one from Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University: “Play is the best way to reach certain goals. Through play, an individual avoids…the lure of ‘false endpoints.’ Players are having so much fun that they keep noodling away at a problem and might well arrive at something better than the first, good-enough solution.” First drafts are first, good-enough solutions. We adults are particularly prone to false endpoints because we like results and we like efficiency. With writing,…
Revision Guides
We can only hold so much information in our heads. Thank goodness for paper and pen! I am an inveterate list-maker, and offer the revision guide as a helpful tool for collecting thoughts and steering revision. The revision guide is a catch-all, holding our vision for the next draft and a list of changes that will help bring this vision about. The guide steers rather than dictates our rewriting. Here are suggestions for what the guide might contain: 1. A simple sentence articulating the heartbeat. 2. Important themes and questions. You can refer to this list while rewriting. Do you stay faithful to your themes and central questions throughout? Do they change and grow? For example, here are some revision notes between the second and third drafts of my novel. Hannah is my main character; two time frames (one in Minnesota, the other in New Mexico) intertwine. • Hannah: “I…
Others’ Eyes
The fastest way to see our writing with fresh eyes is to look through the eyes of a reader. Established authors might profess that they don’t reveal their work to anyone until it’s done, or complain about writing workshops producing works created by consensus. But writers who are still learning the craft need exposure to the dirty inner workings of writing; they need to see others struggling with their same questions, and they need to learn from others’ mistakes and successes. It’s possible to receive nourishing, instructive feedback on a manuscript-in-progress. Here are some thoughts on giving and receiving feedback that will benefit your work: 1. Be careful not to share your work prematurely. Have you allowed yourself plenty of time in that cloud of safety and unknowing? Only solicit feedback when you’re genuinely curious about developing your piece. If you’re looking for someone to endorse your creative process—to say…
Better the Devil You Know: An Exercise
In a minute you’ll read a writing exercise you’ll hate. Your hackles will rise and a bitter taste will fill your mouth. Every bone in your body will resist it. Here’s my challenge: Do it anyway. A first draft is a beautiful thing. Drafts are well worth growing attached to; they have raw energy, bursts of bright prose, moments of surprise and delight, and a ton of effort poured into their pages. A draft bears witness to our creativity: First there was nothing, and now there’s something. How thrilling! First drafts done well, however, are also flawed. The language is too loose, we’ve explored only one of a dozen approaches to our subject, we haven’t yet landed on what the piece is really about. Anne Lamott advises us to write a shitty first draft, but most of us have no other option. The tragedy is that most writers stop here,…
Process & Product
I’m a tender-hearted gardener. When last year’s cherry tomatoes reseed themselves, I don’t have the heart to pull them out. And so I end up with an abundance of late-ripening cherry tomatoes. What to do? Make tomato sauce. But cherry tomatoes are a hassle to peal, even after blanching, so I choose the lazy route, slice them with skins on and throw them in the pot. The resulting tomato sauce is tasty, but a bit watery and swimming with skins. The process by which we create something helps shape the final product. Our exuberance, laziness, playfulness, discipline, patience, bull-headedness, kindness, skill, and all the other qualities we bring to the writing process play a part in the text we finally create. Just as my choice to give the cherry tomatoes room in the garden rather than planting good saucing Romas contributes to the quality of my spaghetti sauce, each choice…
Revisiting the “So what?” Question
“So what?” Insidious, persistent, biting, the simple question is a brain-bug infecting every writer I’ve ever met. It gnaws at our confidence. It stops our pen mid-stroke. It’s a plague infecting whole classrooms—whole cultures, even, undermining the generative instinct because it assumes a vacuous answer. There’s no justification for creative work, it seems. And it’s the most important question a writer should ask. Only the crassest teacher scrawls “So what?” in the margins of a student’s work. Any mentor with half a heart knows that red ink seeps right through the paper and leaves an indelible mark on the writer’s sense of self. Now that I have twenty years of teaching creative writing under my belt, I know my primary job—if I care about the quality of literature emerging in the world; if I care about the well-being of the humans emerging from my instruction—revolves around the “So what?” question. …
Transformation & Writing
During my first years of serious writing, I labored under the conceit that I was writing a book. The thought was bracing; it motivated me to climb out of bed at 5:30 so I’d have a half-hour of solitary creativity before I had to face a classroom of seventh graders. Only as I entered my third and fourth years on the project, having given up public school teaching and discovered that my memoir was not an adventure story about biking through Wales but rather an uncomfortably revealing story about reconciling bisexuality with my Christian upbringing; only as I revised the book a dozen times did I begin to understand what was really happening. The book was writing me. The primary creation was the self I became because of the writing—a self humbled by the truth of my story and yet less afraid to own this truth; a self no longer…
Removing What’s Not Story
I’ve just cut fifty pages from a polished, 400-page draft—that’s one-eighth of what I’d considered a completed book. What was in those pages? A few scenes that slowed down the plot, a lot of unnecessary dialogue, whole paragraphs of exposition, and hundreds of extraneous words extracted from too-long sentences. Everything I cut was not my story. As it’s very possible there are remnants of not-story remaining, I still have some final combing to do. And I’ve no doubt my agent and eventual editor will cut even more. I began working on this novel in 2005, and I am humbled by how much of the volume of what I’ve written has not been my story. Perhaps other writers are more efficient and economical; perhaps others have the capacity to anticipate the essence of an emergent story, or focus their work during the initial drafting, or otherwise find shortcuts that don’t shortchange…
Sifting
My daughter, who is almost a year-and-a-half, has discovered the joys of sifting sand. She shovels it into the colander and watches, fascinated, as it streams through, leaving behind the pebbles which she promptly puts in her mouth. After completing a draft, a writer’s task is to construct a new colander, a tool strong enough to strain out what is no longer needed and leave behind the essence of the story. The challenge in revision is to set aside our attachments to text. We’ve written scenes, characters, expository passages that we assume, by virtue of our effort, must belong. In the last draft of my novel, I included almost twenty pages of conflict around an insurance salesman; these pages were climactic, I thought, and illustrated the hardships all health care workers endure within our insurance-governed medical system. But when I looked closely at my heartbeat, newly articulated, I was forced…