I read Ross Gay’s truly delightful Book of Delights recently where he writes about how writing by hand gives him permission to write digressive, technically ungrammatical but wonderful sentences that he would have probably deleted if he were writing on computer. He continues: “And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking… would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull.”
This got me thinking about revision, and how so many of my students talk about over-revising, or not revising the right aspect of their work, etc., which has led to the opposite extreme of “don’t revise, just keep going” especially when drafting books, which leads to these huge, messy first drafts that are often abandoned because writing something else is so much more fun. Over the years, and with the help of friends, teachers, and mentors, I’ve developed a few principles that have helped me revise, and therefore write, more effectively:
Get the story right before revising. This is simple in to say in principle, hard to do in practice, but line-editing while the bones of the story aren’t there leads to a lot of unnecessary work if you end up having to take out parts you’ve been fiddling with for a long time. I find that it’s better to take a walk to figure out what I want to say rather than moving clauses around.
Revise as you go, but just the right parts. Over time, especially when working on a book, I’ve figured out that the “just keep going” method doesn’t quite work for me. I revise along the way, but only the parts that would materially affect the rest of the story. So I don’t dwell on line edits, but if I realize as I’m writing that I want a plot or story element to change, I usually re-write that part of the story before moving on, otherwise it just keeps nagging at me. Speaking of…
Distinguish between rewriting and editing. If a section isn’t quite there yet in the sense that I don’t think it will work just through line editing, I don’t just keep fiddling with it. I pull it out of the ms and rewrite it completely. Sometimes I have the original text next to me for reference, but just as often I rewrite it from scratch, having learned more about how to write it from having worked on it the first time.
Keep a running list of revision elements. This I learned from the wonderful Danielle Lazarin, with whom I’ve taken a revision workshop. This is especially helpful once you have a complete draft and are doing a top-to-bottom revision. Rather than trying to revise all the elements all at once, it’s helpful to revise element by element in an order that makes sense to you.
Print things out! I can’t stress this enough. If you find yourself stuck, working on a printed draft can make a huge difference because a. you can carry it around all the time, and b. you can manipulate it in ways that you can’t with just a manuscript on computer. See below.
Make it fun. As someone who struggles with maintaining attention, I have so many strategies for making revision fun, ranging from using different inks and highlighters to getting to having different digital voices reading my ms back to me to making a font out of my own handwriting through Calligraphr. Any method that helps you see the ms from a different perspective helps.
Don’t be scared to set something aside. Don’t be discouraged if you’ve done as much as you can for now and something still doesn’t work. You’ve still learned from the process and you never know when the idea might resurrect itself. I speak from experience, as someone publishing a book essay in October that I started five years ago, and having just finished a story I started more than twenty years ago!
HTH, :)
Meredith
P.S. Wanted to mention a couple of upcoming events, first the Big Gay Fundraiser with Loyalty Books this Saturday and for New York folks, I’ll be moderating a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival the Saturday after that. Hope to see some of you there!