Revise, revise, revise

If you want your words

to sing on the page

you need to keep harmonizing, 

keep testing different notes, trying

different combinations of words

arranging and rearranging,

then rearranging again

until the words on the page

find the order they are meant to appear in 

as if the final draft 

is a lock’s combination

that you can only discover

through multiple turnings

as if the words themselves

choose their positions on the page,

as if set there

by some divine hand

some muse with the voice

of an angel 

whose voice 

becomes your voice,

her song, your song.

—

Working on revisions

How do you know when you're finished revising your manuscript?

After the second or third pass, it's easy to believe that you're done. 

You've revised verb tenses and word choices. You've caught typos. You've polished each sentence until it shines like polished silver. 

But are you really done?

If you're working with an editor who you can trust, you can share the manuscript and listen to feedback. 

It's the same with a writing group. If you trust the other writers in the group--and why would you be in a writing group you don't trust?--you listen to their feedback.

If you prefer to work on your own, though, you have a slightly different challenge, which is, ultimately, the same challenge that every writer must face.

You need to listen to your inner voice, which can be deceptive at times.

You need to keep digging, keep asking yourself what's missing. 

What am I forgetting? What does the reader need in this moment? What does my character want, and what's keeping him or her from getting it? And what does he or she do to reach his or her goal?

To answer these questions, you may have to put your manuscript in a drawer for a while. 

A day, a week, or more. 

That's how you can gain distance and change your perspective.

That's how you can return to it with a clearer eye and see gaps or missing pieces that you couldn't have seen when you were so close to it, working on it from the inside, so to speak.

Each time you revise your manuscript, you need to see it the way a reader will see it. 

How might your words strike a reader? What images and scenes will make the greatest impact?  Why does the plot unfold the way it does?

Working on revisions in this way becomes a process of listening more carefully and looking more closely so that you (and ultimately your reader) are able to slip inside your characters and can feel what they're feeling. 

As you keep reviewing the manuscript, you're listening for inconsistencies, for the gaps that you couldn't see on the previous pass, for the issues that you can expand or delete.

The secret is patience. 

Give yourself time.

As many writers have discovered: "Time is the best editor." 

Long Haul Revisions

Sometimes I think revising one’s work is all about letting go.

Like when you fly a kite and the wind pulls the string out of your hand and you have to let go (or get burned by the string) and you watch the kite flying off on its own?

That’s a little bit what revising feels like at the moment.

I’m feeling helpless to guide the characters. They're on their own now, like the kite, free-floating, each character guided by his or her own inner compass, not mine.

But I’m also feeling, after just a half-dozen revisions, that I’m a much more intent observer, trying to take everything in and get it on paper. 

It’s as if I’ve become a recorder of events as they unfold, a conduit, so to speak, for a story that’s happening inside my head as it spins itself out into the world line by line.

If I’m patient and willing to wait quietly—like a fisherman waiting for a fish to bite—I will eventually feel the tug on the hook and know that it won’t be long before I’ll learn something more about the story and the characters in it.

At the moment I’m printing out the latest batch of revisions for a manuscript that I started back in January.

I’m forging forward using one of my writing teacher’s methods of revising, which means that I’ll need to revise these pages in front of me at least 30 more times (thanks, Norma!) before I consider the manuscript finished (or decide if I need to revise for another 30 drafts).

Well, okay, thirty drafts may seem like a stretch--and sixty drafts, well, that's a bit mind-boggling at the moment--but if that’s what it takes, then I’m willing to aim for a high number of revisions, even though it’s daunting to think of revising the same pages that many times.

But here’s one of the surprises that I've learned over the past half-dozen revisions of this particular manuscript.

Revising over and over again is liberating!

The manuscript is still malleable, still a work-in-progress. It can change and grow.

And thinking about revisions in this way—revisions over the long haul—has taken a lot of the pressure off the process.

Instead of trying to shoo the manuscript out the door like a reluctant calf or puppy, I can take my time. I can give myself permission to look at each character with care. I can listen more closely to each character’s voice. I can better understand their struggles.

Until recently I hadn’t realized the manuscripts that I was shooing out the door earlier in my career were too young, too immature, for the world, unable to stand on their own.

In my head they were finished, but on paper they weren’t done and not quite ready to share with readers.

Long haul revisions may seem like a slow process, but, really, it’s just a process of taking the time it takes to get acquainted with my characters and to learn about them on a deeper level, to understand what’s going on beneath the surface of their lives.

This kind of long haul revising is also a process of waiting for characters to talk, to divulge their stories, to share their secrets, so the story itself expands and deepens in ways that I could never have envisioned if I’d stopped revising in an earlier draft.

Truths and lies slip out of their mouths, or they act in ways that I might never have expected. 

And these unexpected moments of discovery take the story on a path that I could never have predicted. They invest the story with life so the story becomes a living, breathing thing, no longer lifeless words on a page but a record of lives in the process of living, searching for answers, exploring the world, and finding… well, each character finds something different, unique to him or her.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the process of long haul revisions (even on days when I have no idea what will happen next or where the story might be going).

I hope you are finding ways to enjoy revising your work, too!

A Writer’s Inner Library

Over the course of a lifetime—from the time as children when a parent or adult begins reading books aloud to us to the time when we can read to ourselves—a writer is likely to read hundreds, if not thousands, of books (as well as the back of a lot of cereal boxes).

Picture books, comic books, ghost stories, mysteries, adventure tales, pirate plots, science fiction, westerns, romances, classics, plays, poetry, literature—it all becomes part of us as we rise early or go to bed late, covering our flashlights with our bed sheets so no one will catch us secretly reading. As long as there are words and pages to turn, we will read and read and read.

Now imagine this. Imagine each book that we ever read or heard read aloud to us has found a place on a metaphorical library shelf that exists within us, a resource hidden inside every writer to sustain us for a lifetime.

Imagine—all the books we ever read! From The Cat in the Hat and Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are to Charlotte’s Web, Robin Hood, Amber Brown, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, The Iliad and Odyssey, A Room of One’s Own, The Scarlet Letter, My Antonia. Any book that we ever picked up and spent time reading, it’s there, sitting on a library shelf and catalogued inside us.

Imagine, too, when it comes time for us to revise our work—whatever pages that we are writing to tell our stories, our poems, our plays—we subconsciously hear the sounds of these books, the cadences and music and rhythm of the words, the pacing of the plots, the feelings that we had for the characters and the settings.

These elements of a story stay with us long after we finish the last page. And they become our guides in revision, a kind of background music, so that as we read our own words, we compare them—their cadence and rhythm and music—against the music of words stored in our inner library, the words that guided us from one book to another, that made us into readers and then into writers.

                                                                                        

I used to think that reading was just about reading—about the joy of holding an imaginary world in one’s hands and immersing oneself in that world—but now I wonder if, as a writer, reading involved more than reading. Certainly it involved reading for pleasure, but I suspect there was also a question gnawing at the back of our minds as we turned the pages: how did the author do that, pull off that trick, make that magic? We read for pleasure, but also for understanding how to construct a story. 

Of course, there aren’t any physical books inside us. But it’s as if the memory of every book that we’ve ever read exists in some way inside us. It's there, available from memory, as we write and revise our manuscripts. And we can hear the background music of these other books as we revise, listening and looking closely at every word, every sentence. It’s as if there’s a monitor of sorts, a revision meter, lets call it, and it sends up a flag whenever a word, sentence, character, or plot needs more work. A flag goes up, I suspect, based on our understanding of the relationship of what we’ve written to all the words that we’ve ever read.

Perhaps it’s a certain sensibility that we cultivate by reading. We gain a sense of taste. Each of us acquires our own sense of taste, and we fine-tune that sense of taste by reading, culling what we love from what we find distasteful, uninteresting. And it’s our sense of taste, which becomes more sophisticated over the years, thanks to all our reading, that helps us write the things we need and want to write.

It can take years to trust one’s sense of taste, one’s love of a certain sound, a particular pace, the way a story is told. And I suspect that long after we’ve written our stories, we will be able to see in these stories some of the books that we read that influenced us along our journeys, and that we still hold safe, well-worn and beloved, inside us.

Looking Between The Lines

I started a new project in February, and I found myself surprised -- the way I'm always surprised when an idea pops into my head -- that suddenly I was writing with eagerness every morning to see where this new idea might lead, curious to discover the story that might be hidden somewhere inside it.

Since then I've written many pages, and I've forced myself to go back to the beginning again and again, and to revise the manuscript's pages with an eye toward discovering what might be missing and what might be added to get the full story on the page.

Each time I begin revising again, it's like starting anew, like climbing up a ladder again, except there are words on the page, unlike when I started out in February and the pages were all blank. This evidence of having written provides some comfort and reassurance, even if the words aren't quite right.

There's still so much that's not yet on the page--even after three months of work--and which needs to be brought into the light.

Much of the revision process, I've learned over time, is trying to figure out what's not on the page but needs to be there. That's often the most frustrating part of the process, too, because although I may know that something feels like it's missing, I don't always know what might be missing or how to find what's missing (except to keep writing).

So, I've learned to work slowly, to go back to the beginning after finishing each draft, to return to the first page and try to see between the lines, to find in that empty space not only words but images and scenes and dialogue.

I try to understand the characters who are making their appearance (often shyly) on the page and who seem reluctant to let themselves be seen, as if they're worried (in the same way that I might worry) about what might happen to them if they reveal themselves fully. On some days I'll find myself with a flood of pages, while on other days, only silence.

Here's something that I don't admit to many people: I worry about making a mistake in the way I am approaching the project. I'm afraid it'll all come crumbling down or the words will turn into a mush of spaghetti before I can finish the story. I worry about not making enough mistakes. And I worry about making too many mistakes and that I'll need to ditch the entire project months from now, a total failure. Sometimes, on days when words won't come, I think revision is just another word for worry.

It helps, I've found, to sit down at the same time every day to start work, whether I have any ideas about where the day's work may take me or not. Just sitting down, opening my laptop, and beginning to type somehow loosens the words and frees my imagination so that I can re-enter the world that I've discovered on the page.

After years of working on different projects, I've learned not to be fooled into thinking that I've finished the revisions just because I happened to finish another draft. Just because words are on the page, just because I've created something that feels finished, doesn't mean it's finished.

I've had to learn how to be patient and to take a long-range view. Not weeks or months but sometimes years. And I've come to enjoy the process of beginning again... and again, even though it isn't easy on some days to be patient and enjoy the process.

What I've found, though, is that patience is often rewarded with new discoveries and new ways of understanding the story, and with these discoveries comes a greater depth and greater clarity to the story.

Layers appear as if by magic, and with each pass another layer appears that I might not have discovered if I hadn't kept working on the manuscript.

Each revision brings a new way of understanding the story, of seeing the story.

Revisions are an integral part of the writing process, a kind of miracle that lets a story unfold in unexpected ways, but only if the writer is patient and willing to return--sometimes against all odds--to begin again, and yet again, to see where the words might lead.

On Writing: John LeCarre

The other day I picked up John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, his best-selling novel about spies and espionage during the Cold War, and started reading the introduction that he'd written in 1991 for the book, which first appeared in the United States in 1974.

Two things struck me about what LeCarre had to say in retrospect about writing the book, the first in a trilogy.

He had written a manuscript, an unfinished version of the story, and had stored it for years in a desk drawer before he started writing the story in earnest.

And that unfinished version didn’t even contain George Smiley, the main character.

There’s a third point, too, and it's the most surprising point of all, I think. 

You’ll discover it when you read the excerpt below:

I have always wanted to set a novel in Cornwall, and to this day Tinker Tailor is as near as I ever came to doing so. The unfinished version that had lain in my desk drawer for years before I started writing the story in earnest did not contain George Smiley at all, but opened instead with a solitary and embittered man living alone on a Cornish cliff, staring up at a single black car as it wove down the hillside toward him. I had chosen in my imagination a spot not unlike the little harbor of Porthgwarra in West Cornwall, where the cottages lie low on the sea’s edge, and  the hills behind seem to be pressing them into the sea. My man was holding a bucket in his hand, on his way to feeding his chickens. He had a limp, as Jim Prideaux has a limp in the version you are about to read, and like Jim he was a former British agent who had walked into a trap set for him by a traitor inside his own service, called “The Circus.”

My original plan was for the Circus investigators to put this figure back into harness, in a way that would provoke the unknown traitor to try his hand again, and thus reveal himself. I wanted the entire story to play in contemporary time and not in the flashbacks I later resorted to. But when I got down to writing the book for real, I discovered that I was painting myself into a corner. I could think of no plausible way to pursue a linear path forward while at the same time peering back down the path that had brought my man to the point where the story began. So one day, after months of frustration, I took the whole manuscript into the garden and burned it, and began again.

LeCarre burned the whole manuscript. 

And, after months of frustration, he began again.

  

Burning the manuscript didn't mean he'd given up on the story. 

It meant just the opposite: the story was starting to come into focus.

Try to remember this when you feel as if you've come to a dead-end, an impassable wall, and are ready to burn your manuscript.

Each draft, even those we feel we must burn, helps us get to the next stage.

Are You A Writer?

Can you accept imperfection?

Can you accept that you'll need to revise again and again (and still again), that the word you're looking for may not appear until the twentieth or thirtieth draft? 

Can you accept that one day your writing will flow like wine and the next day the well may run dry and all you can do is sit at your desk and stare for hours at an empty screen?

Can you accept that one scene on a given day may work beautifully but adding another scene on the following day may make the previous scene unnecessary?

Can you accept that the purpose of your first draft is to lead you to your second draft and the purpose of the second draft is to lead you to your third, on and on until the story comes together?

Can you live for days or months or years with failure (which is what others will call your efforts if you don't publish your work) and accept that those---who see not publishing as failure---fail themselves to understand writing as an ongoing process?

Can you accept the unexpected mountains that you'll have to climb and the unanticipated twists and turns in the road and enjoy the journey for its own sake, not for where the road might take you but for the pure pleasure of being on the road?

Can you accept that you'll find others on the road who will try to discourage you from continuing on your journey (and yet you still keep writing)?

Can you hold fast to your own belief in yourself?

Can you steer through darkness by the solitary flame of hope that burns in your heart?

Can you find joy in writing with or without financial gain or reward or recognition?

Can you keep writing so that at the end of your journey, when you no longer have the strength to lift a pen but still feel the desire to write, you can say you gave your best?

Then, perhaps, you are a writer.