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.

The fear and magic of writing

I'm revising lightly as I go through the manuscript again, but it's not easy to face the truth of what's on paper. 

I put this off for months, and each morning I'm still putting it off, not wanting to find out if I failed, not wanting to find out if I'm a failure. 

This fear (of being a failure) runs through my veins. It's what causes my need to procrastinate. It's what keeps me away from the manuscript for days and weeks, from working on it for months, from improving it, from enjoying it. 

As soon as I manage to overcome this fear and return to the manuscript, though, I find myself absorbed by it, drawn back into that world, pulled back into the spaciousness of my imagination. 

Maybe that's what is so scary--leaving reality and its solid footing for the imaginary world, worried I'll lose myself there and never return? 

It's funny (I realized this morning as I was working on the revisions) the way holding the pen in my hand roots me to reality and takes me into the imaginary world simultaneously. 

Isn't it interesting how I can enter an imaginary world and stay rooted in this one, the "real" world, at the exact same moment?

My pen is like a talisman. Its mysterious properties let me go in two different directions at once. 

I can write my way into the world of imagination while writing words that appear on the page and remain physically present in this world, this reality. 

Maybe this is the magic of writing. 

It lets us inhabit two (or more) worlds at once. 

And maybe it's the magic of reading, too.

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.

The Essence of the Process

If you read only one book about the writing process this year, I hope you'll consider John McPhee's Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process.

It contains eight essays on the writing process that were previously published in The New Yorker, the magazine where McPhee's work has appeared since 1965, and where you may have read some, or all, of these pieces.

If you have read any of these essays before, I recommend reading them again, since I find McPhee's work so rich that it can easily sustain multiple readings, each time offering up some new jewel that the reader may have missed or overlooked. And if you haven't yet read any of them, you are in for a treat.

You'll discover a man's love of the craft of writing, and a devotion to the process of putting words on paper reminiscent of a religious scribe, a man passionate about language and its usage and the delight that it provides for reveling in life's joys and mysteries.

McPhee believes wholeheartedly in revision as the core of the process. "The difference between a common writer and an improviser on a stage (or any performing artist) is that writing can be revised. Actually, the essence of the process is revision. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes Express Mail from fairyland."

If you take away just one nugget of truth from this book, let it be this one: The essence of the process is revision.

One of the things that I love about McPhee's approach to writing, and his willingness to teach writing to others (he's taught students at Princeton University, his alma mater, for years), is his understanding that each writer is cut from different cloth and approaches the problem of getting words on paper differently.

He gives us as examples the different ways his two daughters deal with the process.

"Jenny grew up to write novels, and at this point has published three. She keeps everything close-hauled, says nothing and reveals nothing as she goes along."

But keeping things close-hauled isn't the way his younger daughter Martha goes about the process.

"Her sister Martha, two years younger, has written four novels. Martha calls me up nine times a day to tell me that writing is impossible, that she's not cut out to do it, that she'll never finish what she is working on, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth and so on."

Two writers, two different ways of approaching the process.

Actually, three writers. There's McPhee himself who shares his own approach.

"It is toward the end of the second draft, if I'm lucky," writes McPhee, "when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, but it is hardly euphoria. It's just a new lease on life, a sense that I'm going to survive until the middle of next month."

There's a wealth of information in Draft No. 4 that will provide sustenance for you as a writer for weeks, if not months and years, whether you write fiction or, like McPhee, nonfiction.

And if you love reading The New Yorker, you'll love learning a bit of what goes on behind its cover and pages since McPhee generously shares stories about his working relationships with editors at the magazine who have nurtured and guided him along the way.

If you're curious about the kind of advice McPhee offers, here's a link to his essay, "Draft No. 4," as it appeared in 2013 in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4 

And here's a link to the book, if you want to take a look: 
https://www.amazon.com/Draft-No-4-Writing-Process/dp/0374142742

And if you're interested in The New York Times' review of the book, click this link:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/books/review-draft-no-4-john-mcphee.html