13
The Writing Process and Revision
I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In graduate school, I once submitted a workshop story that nobody liked, not one person. I remember one woman: she dangled my work in front of her and said, her lips curling in distaste, “I don’t understand why this story even exists!” As I walked home that night—dejected and furious—I could still tell that her comment, though poorly worded, had something in it I needed to hear. It has stayed with me throughout the years, and now, when I’m at the final stage of revision, it’s her question I hear in my head: Why does this essay exist? I go back to work.
At this stage in the writing process, the draft becomes nothing more than a fruitful scavenging ground. Right now, as I write, I’m in the middle of Wyoming, and down the road a huge junkyard lies at the intersection of two minor highways. Against the rolling fields of wheat grass, this junkyard rises as ten acres of glinting metal, bent chrome, colors of every hue. One of my fellow colonists, a sculptor, began buying scraps to incorporate in her work: gorgeous landscapes with ribbons of rusted metal juxtaposed across blue skies.
Now I’ve come to see the junkyard as a place of infinite possibility. What useful parts still hum in the innards of these machines? How will they be unearthed? What kind of work would it take to make them shine?
—BRENDA
The Drafting Process
Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
—GENE FOWLER
When you first sit down to work, you may have no idea what the writing will bring. Maybe it even scares you a little, the thought of venturing into that unknown territory. Perhaps you circle your desk a while, distracting yourself with chores or email, wary of the task at hand. Or maybe you are the type of writer who can sit down and start writing without hesitation, training yourself to write at least one full paragraph before stopping. You know you’ll go back and trim and revise, so you just keep the words coming.
Either way, the important thing to know, for yourself, is your own style. In the first case, to the untrained eye, you may appear engaged in nothing but mere procrastination. But if you know yourself well, you understand that puttering is essential to your writing process. Or, in the second case, you act more like an athlete in training, knowing that routine and discipline are essential for your creative process. You write quickly because that’s the only way for you to outrun your inner critic. Neither way is “correct.” The only correct way to write is the way that works for you.
The writing process is just that: a process. You must have the patience to watch the piece evolve, and you need an awareness of your own stages of creativity. You must know when you can go pell-mell with the heat of creation, and when you must settle down, take a wider view, and make some choices that will determine the essay’s final shape.
Discovery Drafts
I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.
—SUSAN SONTAG
First drafts can be seen as “discovery drafts”; much of the writing you did from the prompts in Part 1 will fall into this category. You are writing to discover what you know or to recover memories and images that may have been lost to you. You are going for the details, the unexpected images, or the storyline that reveals itself only as you go along. The best writing you do will have this sense of exploration about it; you allow yourself to go into the unknown, to excavate what lies beneath the surface.
It’s important to allow yourself permission to write anything in a first draft; otherwise you might censor yourself into silence. The first draft is the place where you just might light upon the right voice for telling this particular story; once you’re onto that voice, you can write for hours. If you train yourself to write without overthinking the material, it will also become easier to let some of that writing go when it comes time to revise. (For ideas on how to use writing groups, contracts, and challenges to spur new writing, see Chapter 14, “The Power of Writing Communities.”)
The Revision Process
No matter how good your discovery draft material seems at first glance, most often it will need some shaping and revision before it is ready for public eyes. Revision, perhaps, is an acquired taste, but you may find that revision actually becomes the most “creative” part of creative nonfiction. It is in revision that the real work begins.
Global Revision
Revision can often be mistaken for line editing. There is a time, naturally, for going back to your prose to fine-tune the grammar, change a few words, and fix typos. But first you need to look at the essay as a whole and decide what will make this essay matter. What is the real subject of the piece? What image takes on more significance than you realized? What now seems superfluous? We call this “global revision.”
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, in her book Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice, describes global revision this way:
I recently learned a new way to understand the word “respect.” The roots are the same as “revise”—to see again. The surprising similarity between these words shines a fresh light on revision: When we see something anew, we come to respect it. Each new perspective, each layer of understanding, deepens our regard. Seen in this light, revision is the most respectful approach to our writing.
It’s beneficial to take some time between drafts at this stage of the process. After that first heady flush of creation settles down, you’ll better be able to pinpoint the areas that sing and those that fall flat. You’ll be able to notice an unexpected theme that emerges organically through the imagery you chose. You’ll hear how the ending may actually be the beginning of your piece. Or the beginning may make for a better end. Andrew describes this process as listening for the “heartbeat” of your piece. Where is it most alive? What new material does the writing demand to flourish? (See Try It #1 at the end of this chapter for ideas on how to go about this global revision process.)
At this point you need to see the work as fluid, with infinite possibilities still to come. What you may have intended to write may not be the most interesting part of the essay now. Be open to what has developed in the writing process itself, and don’t be afraid to cut out those areas that no longer work.
Ask yourself this question: What is the essence of the topic for this particular essay? Many times it’s easy to think that we have to put in everything we know or feel about a topic in one essay. You have to figure out what is necessary for this essay and this essay alone. You will write other essays about the topic, don’t worry. As writer Natalie Goldberg put it, “Your main obsessions have power; they are what you will come back to in your writing over and over again. And you’ll create new stories around them.”
You may keep only a small portion of the original work, perhaps even just one line. But by doing this kind of pruning, you enable new, more beautiful and sturdy growth to emerge. Take comfort in knowing the old work may find its way into new essays yet to come. If it’s hard for you to let go of a section completely, put it in a “fragments” file and know that you will call it back sometime in the future. Time and again, we have found new homes for those bits and pieces of prose that just didn’t work in their original homes.
The Role of the Audience
When you’re writing a first draft, it’s often necessary to ignore any concept of audience just so you can get the material out. An attentive audience, hanging on your every word, can be inhibiting at that stage of the writing process. But when you’re revising, some concept of audience will help you gain the necessary distance to do the hard work that needs to get done.
This audience can be a single person, an ideal reader you have in mind. Or the audience can be much larger. Many times, having a reading venue or publication in mind can focus your attention in a way that nothing else can. Many towns have readings in cafés or bookstores where beginning and experienced writers are invited to read their work to an audience. If you are brave enough to commit yourself to reading one night, you will find yourself in a fever of revision, reading the piece aloud many times and getting every word just right.
Or you might decide that you’re ready to start sending your work out for publication. Find one journal and read as many copies as you can, then revise your piece with this publication in mind. You’ll surprise yourself with the focus you can generate once the piece leaves the personal arena and goes public. (See Chapter 15, “Publishing Your Creative Nonfiction,” for more details on the publication process.)
Three Quick Fixes for Stronger Prose
After you’ve done the hard labor on your essay, you’ll want to do the finish work, the small things that make the prose really shine. This is often called “local revision.” (We don’t mean to suggest these two processes are mutually exclusive; naturally you will find yourself adjusting the prose as you go along.) We have three quick fixes that make any piece stronger: “search and destroy,” “the adjective/adverb purge,” and “the punch.”
Search and Destroy
The most overused verbs in the English language are variations of to be—these include is, are, were, was, and so forth. While these verbs are necessary (note how we just used them!), often you can sharpen your prose by going over the piece carefully and eliminating as many of these weak verbs as you can. To do this you will need to look closely at the words surrounding the to be verbs; often you can find a stronger verb to take its place or a juicier noun. Even if you eliminate just an is here or a was there, the resultant prose will seem much cleaner and lighter. It’s the kind of work the reader won’t notice directly (except for word nuts like us), but it will immediately professionalize your prose.
Take a draft of an essay that is nearly finished. Go through it and, with a red pen, circle all the to be verbs. Go back and see if you can rework any of those sentences to replace them with verbs that feel more “muscled,” have more impact to them. Sometimes you’ll find you don’t need the sentence at all, and you’ll have eliminated some deadweight. If you’re working in a group, exchange essays with one another and do the same thing. Suggest new lines that eliminate the to be verbs.
The Adjective/Adverb Purge
Often, adjectives can be your enemy rather than your friend. Adjectives or adverbs can act as crutches, holding up weak nouns or verbs, and they actually water down your prose rather than intensify it. As with the search-and-destroy exercise, the point here is not to eliminate adjectives and adverbs altogether, but to scrutinize every one and see if it’s necessary for the point you want to get across.
Take an essay you think is nearly finished and circle every adjective and adverb. Go back and see if you can rework the sentences to eliminate these words and replace them with stronger verbs, nouns, or both. Or you can take stronger measures. For at least one writing session, ban adjectives and adverbs from your vocabulary. See how this exercise forces you to find more vivid nouns and verbs for your prose.
The Punch
Professional writers develop a fine ear for language. Writers are really musicians, aural artists attuned to every rhythm and nuance of their prose. And when you study the writers you admire, you’ll invariably find that they tend to end most of their sentences, all of their paragraphs, and certainly the closing line of the essay, with potent words that pack a punch. They do not allow their sentences to trail off but close them firmly and strongly, with words that leave the reader satisfied. When you work toward strong closing words in your sentences, the prose also takes on a new sense of momentum and trajectory, the sentences rearranging themselves in fresh ways to wield that satisfying “crack.”
Read your essay aloud, paying attention to the sounds of the words at the ends of sentences and paragraphs. Do they ring clearly, firmly ending your thought? Or do they trail off in abstraction? Circle any words that seem weak to you; then go back and rework these sentences for better closing effects. Pay particular attention to the word you use to end the entire essay. How do you leave your readers? What will they remember?
An Example of the Writing Process
We asked the writer Bernard Cooper for his thoughts on the writing process. Here is what he had to say:
I edit relentlessly—have already revised this very statement. My prose itself tends to come in short bursts, while the bulk of my time is involved in trying different words and sentence structures and punctuation so those word-bursts say exactly what I want them to. Revision seems to me the writer’s most crucial task; you are given the chance to make your work as powerful as possible. “Words are all we have,” said novelist Evan Connell, “and they’d better be the right ones.” Anyone who has written for long knows the pleasure in finding the word that makes a description suddenly more vivid, or finding the structure that makes a sentence more taut, surprising, rhythmic, or funny.
When you write well, revision becomes not a chore, but the essence of the writing act itself. What came before cleared the way for what is to come; no writing is ever wasted, no time spent at the desk useless. Writing creates its own rhythm and momentum, and you must be willing to go with it, to become absorbed in the task, to let go of the writing you once thought precious.
At one time or another, many writers experience what they call “gifts”—essays or poems or stories that seem to come effortlessly, full-blown onto the page with little revision or effort. But as the poet Richard Hugo put it, “Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. . . . The hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.”
TRY IT
1. Practice global revision. Take out a piece you wrote at least a month ago. Read it aloud, either to yourself or to a kind audience. Here are some specific questions to ask yourself as you go about the global revision process:
• What is the piece really about? Write this theme or idea or emotion down in a word or short phrase and use it as a guiding force for revision.
• Is there one image that can be used as a cohesive thread throughout the piece? How can you amplify this image and transform it from beginning to end?
• Have you chosen the most effective point of view for telling the story? What happens when you experiment with third person? Second person?
• Look closely at the beginning paragraph of your essay. Do you begin in a way that draws the reader in? Often, the first few paragraphs of a rough draft act as “clearing the throat.” Is the true beginning really a few pages in?
• Look closely at the end of the essay. Do you end in a way that leaves the reader with a compelling image? Often it’s tempting to “sum up” the essay in a way that can be wholly unsatisfying to the reader. Can you end on an image rather than an idea?
• How do the beginning and ending paragraphs mirror or echo one another? The first and last paragraphs act as a frame for the piece as a whole. They are, in a way, the most important places in the essay, because they determine everything that happens in between. If you make an effort to connect them in some way—repeating a key image from the beginning, bringing back on stage the major players for a final bow—you will find a stunning finish to the piece.
2. In Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s book Living Revision, she suggests creating a visual diagram of your essay. Draw a circle that represents the core or the “hub” of your essay. Write inside it one or two words that distill the essence of your essay so far: the theme you identified in Try It #1. Then draw a larger circle around it, and within this circle write down notes about what you’ve already written in the essay. Then draw a third larger circle, within which you’ll jot notes about the scenes, memories, and/or experiences that are not in the essay yet and possibly should be. Contemplate this diagram to see if it gives you a road map on how to proceed in global revision. What needs to stay? What needs to go? What new sections still need to be written?
3. Practice local revision, using the “Three Quick Fixes for Stronger Prose” section in this chapter. Go through an essay that you feel is nearly done, circling first the verbs, then the adjectives and adverbs, then the end words of each sentence. What do you notice when you highlight these important areas of your sentences? How can you rework even a few of these sentences for stronger effects? Share this process with others to get their eyes on this material as well.
4. Refer to Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” and Chapter 12, “The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form.” Use the categories in those chapters to revise your work. Look for places that could use more sensory detail or scene. Is there a moment where you could slow down and expand the imagery? Consider your characters: Are they fully formed? What about your structure? How about your tenses? Are you tied to past tense or present tense? Where can you make some changes to strengthen the overall effect of your piece?
FOR FURTHER READING
Resources Available Online:
• Grammar Girl sends out a weekly newsletter with handy tips for common grammar and stylistic challenges.
Print Resources
• Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
• The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White