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." 

Revising, then re-revising

For my current project I’m re-reading the opening lines again and again, and revising, then re-revising.

With each draft I go a little further, adding voices, taking out stanzas, finding words malleable, nothing set in stone.

It’s liberating, this way of revising, but also terrifying. Everything keeps changing. And the implication of such changes (in my mind, at least) is that whatever I wrote to begin with must have been wrong … or not good enough. 

I have to remind myself that each draft is in a state of becoming. 

I have to tell myself it may not be good enough yet, but it will become good enough if I keep revising it.

This doubt (about whether it’s good enough, about whether I’m good enough) only intensifies with each draft and becomes another obstacle that I have to overcome if I want to return to the page each day. 

What’s critical is that I learn to ignore this voice saying I’m not good enough. (Or why bother? Or you’ll never succeed.)

To succeed I need to keep working on the draft. 

I need to keep revising. 

I need to keep alive the curiosity that wants to know what happens next… and what might happen if I add this word or take away this phrase… and how the poem or story might change… and how the reader’s understanding of the story might deepen.

So I keep revising, waiting with hope for the puzzle pieces to fall into place. 

It feels like I’m working without a net.

And on some days I wonder why I do this.

Maybe it’s because I feel such pleasure discovering what might happen, creating something new, something never seen before. 

Maybe it’s because I enjoy carving a path where there never was a path before.

You know the feeling, too, I’m guessing. 

How following your own path leads to moments of discovery that are a source of joy. (Maybe I should call them moments of revelation.) 

Suddenly, the page opens in ways I never could have predicted, and a source of light illuminates the darkness.

This is what I love most about writing.

How the words flow from my pen each morning, how the ink appears on the page, how the lines form into stanzas, paragraphs, poems, stories.

How writing lets me feel as if I’m part of a larger story that I’m trying to tell (and trying to figure out at the same time).

And, most of all, how I can look back after a day or week or month at the pages that have accumulated and feel that I am where I belong, here, with paper and pen in hand, part of an ongoing mystery.

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.

The Shell Path

Even though I don’t live near the sea, there’s a shell path on the side of our front yard, a narrow swath of white seashells that marks the boundary between our property and our neighbor’s yard.

It’s not a very wide path, perhaps two feet across, and it’s not a very long path, maybe thirty or forty feet long, but it helps establish a clear line between the two yards, and I love the way the shells remind me of the sea, even if I can’t see or hear it from our home.

Every month or so I spend a few hours moving up and down the path pulling weeds. It is tedious work because the weeds are often long and stringy and deeply rooted. It’s not easy to grasp them, especially when wearing gardening gloves, and it’s never easy to pull them out entirely.

I’ll squat on my heels, stretching my calves and Achilles tendons, straining my quads, until I switch legs for balance or to relieve a cramp, and I’ll work with my back bent beneath the warm sun and think about the sea and how the sunlight sparkles off its surface and how the waves roll into shore and then retreat out to sea again.

After ten or fifteen minutes, it’s easy to lose my patience and perspective, to forget the larger picture—how the path serves as a boundary between our yards, how the shells, once weeded, look so beautiful, like a path stretching toward the sea—and it’s easy to become frustrated because the work doesn’t go faster.

But becoming frustrated doesn’t help the work. It only inhibits my ability to enjoy the sight of the shells and the vision of the finished path in my mind.

That's when I have to remind myself to slow down, to let go of my expectations of how the work should go, and to see—really look hard and see—what’s in front of me at this moment, to understand what needs to be taken care of now.

Maybe the weeds don’t belong where they are growing, or I'd prefer them to grow elsewhere, but rushing to pull them will only mean that I’ll miss more of the weeds than I’ll pull. And then I’ll only have to return to pull out the rest at some point.

This process of weeding, of keeping the shell path free of weeds, reminds me of the way the revision process works.

I’ll put down words in the same way a gardener might put down a shell path. At first, the words look perfect. The sentences appear straightforward, the verbs and adjectives strong and firmly rooted, and there isn’t a weed in sight.

But then I begin to see things that I didn’t see, not because I wasn’t careful or precise when I put the words down, but because I simply lacked the ability to see the weeds. I was too close to the material.

So, when I go back to the beginning of a manuscript to revise it, I try to slow down, to look at it as part of a larger picture, to understand what needs to be done in this moment. It’s the same process as weeding the shell path.

I have to pull unnecessary words the same way I pull weeds on the shell path. I have to go back to the beginning and start over. Neatening, straightening, clearing out clutter, cleaning up.

I want the manuscript to read cleanly, without any distractions for the reader, just as I want the path to offer a clear, unobstructed path, whether it leads to our back yard or to the sea in my imagination.

This kind of work takes patience. It requires a willingness to slow down and really see what is on the page (not what I might hope or think is on the page but what is actually there).

Most of all, it takes a certain commitment and devotion to work on the path, to keep working, even when my legs and back ache, even when my fingers start to bleed from reaching past the sharp edges of the shells and the gloves have torn, even when the mosquito bites itch and the red ant bites burn as if my skin is on fire.

Each writer must learn how to stay in the moment and do this work.

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