Re-writing

A read­er writes: “You’ve shared that you revise many, many times. Is there an order to that revision?”

It was said (I para­phrase) that Shakespeare’s mind and hand went so well togeth­er that there was scarce a blot on his papers. To which Ben Jon­son famous­ly replied, “Would he had blot­ted a thousand!”

I sus­pect that where­as all writ­ers revise (except maybe Shake­speare) no doubt they do so in their own fash­ion. Speak­ing for myself, revi­sion is not mere­ly con­stant but starts with the first sen­tence I write. Re-writ­ing is the way I write. It’s my process. Which is to say I don’t think I’m a good writer: I think I’m a decent re-writer.

I will tell stu­dents, “If, when you first write some­thing and you think it’s good, you’re in trou­ble. But when you write some­thing and you think it’s not very good, that’s great. Because now you can write it bet­ter. Nobody, nobody, nobody writes any­thing very good the first time.”

One and done doesn’t do.

Revi­sion is the name of the game.

What guides my revi­sions more than any­thing is my read­ing skills. This is to say I try to fol­low my mantra: “Writ­ers don’t write writ­ing. They write reading.”

To get the read­er to read, to care, to under­stand, to share the expe­ri­ence depict­ed in the text is the ulti­mate goal.

So, there are many things I’m going after: Depth of char­ac­ter, log­ic of plot, believ­abil­i­ty, sus­pense, and energy—to name a few. By re-read­ing my text—pen in hand—it’s my intu­ition (as a read­er) that most­ly guides me. That is, you can­not (I believe) be a good writer with­out being a good reader.

I do have some mechan­i­cal tricks. Some­times I arbi­trar­i­ly choose a page num­ber, go to that page and revise. This removes the sec­tion from the very things I want over all (see above) and helps refash­ion sen­tences, para­graphs, even words.

If I come upon a strong adjective—“horrified”—in my text I check to see if I have used the word in excess. (Hur­rah for com­put­er word find­ers!) When you over use strong words they are much diluted.

Giv­en a full man­u­script of X pages in length, I set out to cut say, ten pages, there­by mak­ing the book tighter, less verbose.

I will give the book to trust­ed read­ers for their cri­tique. That is a mas­sive help in revision.

Read­ing the work aloud to some­one (I always start with my wife) allows me to hear the book’s weak­ness­es and strengths.

The whole point is not to think of revi­sion as a sep­a­rate part of writ­ing. Revi­sion is writing.