On Revision, or, Improving Your Position

Part 3 of a chess-inspired series

I have a confession: I spent most of my writing career being a lazy reviser. I’ve always loved drafting, but up until a few years ago, I only revised whenever I expected a piece to be published, because I found the revision process drudgerous and boring. So unless the glory of publication (ha ha) was on the horizon, I was totally unmotivated to do it. I doubt I would have been able to publish a book had I not sold it on proposal and had my wonderful editor Elda Rotor expecting it.

One of my revision pages… I’m a color-coder. Red is for structure and blue for tone.

Flash forward to Fall 2024 when I found myself teaching a revision seminar at Sarah Lawrence while learning chess at the same time. So yes, I’ve recently learned to love revision, and have started calling myself a “born-again reviser,” having recently discovered the joys of revision and eager to spread those joys to my students. At the same time, I was learning that chess as a game is a microcosm of revision, where you start out with a plan and continue revising it with every move you make. It’s an oft-quoted saying in chess that it’s a new game with every move, because every move brings with it a new position with new dynamics and possibilities. One has to always be adaptable and willing to change one’s plan to suit every new reality each move brings.

One of the things I learned recently—and chess aficionados please forgive me if I mess this up; I’m a neophyte—is that the great many-time chess world champion Garry Kasparov was known as a “positional player,” meaning that he often didn’t go for super-aggressive moves and big attacks, but rather slowly but surely improved his position by subtly moving pieces around on the board until he’s ready to deliver a crushing blow.

I see a great lesson to be learned from this for writers. First, one of the reasons I often hear for writers being unmotivated to revise is that they don’t actually know if they’re improving the piece by revising, or just moving words around aimlessly. This is why it’s important to break a draft down into smaller components—pieces, if we want to extend the chess metaphor—and decide for oneself what one’s goal is in performing a revision. Just as one puts a bishop or queen on a square where it can potentially attack more pieces, a writer, before deciding to revise, can say to themself: “My goal is to deepen character relationships” or speed up the plot, or make the style more colloquial, whatever specific component of the work they want to improve. That way, once they’ve done the revision, they have a way to evaluate whether or not they’ve actually accomplished their goal.

The second lesson is that revision doesn’t always have to mean making big changes or expecting one pass to solve all of a piece’s problems. We all have days when we have the sense that there’s something in the piece that isn’t working, but we don’t have any concrete ideas about how to fix it. When I find myself in this state, I keep Kasparov in mind and think of something seemingly small to revise but is likely to improve the piece, just as Kasparov makes quiet moves to improve his position, knowing that any small improvement early in the game could only help him win in the long run.

For me, a subtle improvement can look like searching for all instances of “that” in a story and deciding whether the sentence can do without it. It can mean going over the dialogue of a single character to make sure their speech is consistent, especially if they have a dialect or regional accent. It can mean cutting out adjectives or putting some of them back, or working on section transitions to make sure one part of a piece flows seamlessly into another. No matter how small, every revision brings a piece closer to its full potential, and the cumulative effect is palpable. More than that, just the practice of looking over a piece again is likely to give a writer more ideas on how to improve, whether these types of subtle changes or something more radical.

So when you find yourself unmotivated, keep in mind that you can always improve your position through revision, and that is always better than not doing anything at all.

Until next time,

Meredith

P.S. Yes, I know things are dire, but I hope there will always be room for art.