Increasing Your Ability to Revise Written Work
Coffee and a little to eat often accompanies writing and revision.
Open-Ended Learning
I use the words “Increasing Your Ability,” because writing and revision are open-ended when it comes to improvement. You won’t learn how to revise written work as a process of simple, fool-proof measures that rule out error. Even an editor can miss any mistakes you make. And although posts from other websites will list helpful steps for you to follow, mine is not only about writing as an open-ended possibility; it acknowledges that the margin of error is always something to be aware of. Altogether, more art is involved than certainty about how to revise.
Rather than trying to pin down a product, think of your work as an organic whole that can grow on the reader rather than merely meet expectations. And besides those belonging to other readers, expectations whether of your own, an editor’s, or a teacher’s or professor’s—besides whatever plans you have for the work, mere expectations should be cast aside and the writing imbued with quality that surprises readers.
You might complain of mine as a standard you don’t need to reach, but I’m speaking of a spectrum we’re all on. No one needs to feel he can’t do better. Speaking of steps, regardless of what I said earlier, the first one to take is to acknowledge that as with anything else, you can increase your ability. You don’t need to just get by. You may be a supermarket worker as I was until I recently retired. You don’t have to hold a high position to achieve excellence as a writer. If you do your honest best as a habit, you’re on the way to achieving that excellence.
Decades ago, I was a member of Schooley’s Mountain Poets in New Jersey. We critiqued each other’s work, and sometimes entertained guest readers, such as poet BJ Ward. Near the end of the group’s existence, we met at Murray Reed’s home, who once said of a poem he wrote, “I don’t know what the poem means. I’m just the artist. You decide what it means, not me.”
That speaks volumes to the possibility of writing—and writing well—without pinning it down as if you have more control than really do, not to mention that it can be reassuring when others find in your writing relevant meaning you hadn’t been aware of. That means there’s more to you and your work than you know, including the potential for further growth.
The elusiveness of the truth as it cares for itself is like a work of art inspired from a source within that you can’t fully know, because it doesn’t entirely reveal itself.
Contrasting Revision with Journaling
I write by hand in notebooks. That’s obviously not the only writing I do, but it amounts to unrevised journaling that places a premium on getting it right in the first place, an object lesson for those writers who depend upon revision.
It’s important to contrast good writing that breaks the rule ”revise, revise, revise!” because that emphasizes writing as the primary concern, not revision. If revision is no longer secondary to writing, one might question whether substance is getting lost on it.
I find I always write journal entries with an immediate intensity that often results in trenchantly insightful work. Good practice for writing with publication in mind.
As I say, not all good writing is revised writing, no matter what other writers will tell you. Writing by hand without replacing eliminated lines is an act of honesty and candor that revising to polished effect can’t replace. It’s a way to nourish the soul so the screen doesn’t whitewash responses from deep within. I have hundreds of handwritten notebooks that stand proudly on their own, regardless of who says they’re publishable or not.
Writing by hand is the perennial way to undo the defining characteristics of the writing business. It challenges the conventions, and if it never sees the light of day in published form, it quite possibly is no less valuable for what it is.
I did nothing but handwrite notebooks—besides very little work for local papers—for 13 years, more and less, of living at the Jersey Shore, working self-employed at treading clams in wild inshore waters for four or five hours a day. Sometimes fewer hours. Sometimes more. Sometimes days without treading at all. Time that allowed spending hours every day reading and writing. But throughout those years, I planned on returning to mainstream society and writing for publication.
What is Revision?
Besides a handful of poems published in literary magazines beginning in 1999, I began getting magazine articles published again in 2005. (I first got magazine articles published as a 16-year-old in 1977.) Over the course of the past 20 years, in addition to hundreds of articles and essays published, some poems, too, I’ve written 500 pages of a novel’s first draft, a 300-page draft of a well-revised book on why fishing matters, and I come closer to finishing a memoir, so I have some experience at revising work.
At first blush, the essence of revision seems the riddance of verbiage. As Strunk and White say, “Omit needless words!” It’s never as easy to do as when you let a written piece sit for months or years. Not overnight, as I will let the blog post I’m writing now sit, but practically, overnight may be the best you can do besides giving the finished writing one last check.
I did take a three-year hiatus at writing my memoir. When I opened the Word document, omitting needless words was easy, but as I got involved in re-writing, I began to feel my immediate insight into what I could delete began to fade. No worries, though, because I can still judge what needs to go; it just takes a little effort to spot, whereas the effortlessness at first had been a joy.
Revising a book is vastly other to revising a 750- or 1200-word article, not to mention that for writing a book, more about revision is involved than I can cover in one article. More than omitting needless words. Nor is that to say articles are or should be easy to write, or that I will even begin to cover everything about revising them. Some writers fly in the face of finishing with clean copy, feeling they must finish an article quickly. They fear earning less money on the hour.
I’ve got a reminder for them: professional work isn’t on the clock. It’s not paid by the hour. Why would anyone need to pretend it is?
It’s appreciated by an editor for how good it is. That’s what you should believe in. Not only when readers tell you the work makes them feel they’re in the place you show them, if the article or essay relates physical place. But when your editor tells you they tell him the same about your work.
Revision is word choice, but it’s also making sure that when you show a scene, it’s fully present to the reader, and when you summarize, you do so succinctly. Writing a book, on the other hand, involves structuring it in a way that creates a seamless whole, involving greater complexity than doing the same for an article or essay.
From my own experience, revising a book for structure is two-fold. I rely on asking Google AI specific questions that help me understand how to do it, and I read posts by writers well-informed on memoir structure. I also happen to be reading at present a second book on memoir structure, and I’m reading a few memoirs.
It’s not my idea to go into what these books teach me, but to point out you’re not alone when it comes to feeling baffled about how to proceed. Do your research diligently, and you’ll find your answers. Join a writers group. They’re essentially helpful. The second part of revising a book for structure is to rely on the revision process. After you have a rough draft, the more you revise, the more you can ask yourself as you continue to revise—and ask your online resources—what the book needs to move forward, until you have finished work. Besides other members of your writers group, let an agent or editor tell you what it might need beyond that.
An Inciting Incident
Yes, “the inciting incident” happens to be an element of memoir structure, but that’s beside my point right now. I say I suffered an inciting incident about a year ago, because it felt like hell, but if not for the like of that—an inciting incident that gathers my whole being in relation to my work and focuses my mind—I would never grow in my revision process. As the proverbial phrase proves itself a million times a day, “we learn from our mistakes.” Enjoy my little vignette on what happened.
I got a poem published in The Flyfish Journal, and mind you, poems typically don’t receive payment when published, but I was paid pretty well. And yet, I found a line I had botched, and that upset me a great deal:
“Through ceaseless seasonal rounds we will/ never find all the innumerable originals—reddish brookies—/ in pane-enclosed pools. (Browns breed out the hatchery.)”
I remembered that when I revised the poem, I had felt stumped on “(Browns breed out the hatchery.)” and tried several other possibilities of wording, which didn’t work. When I settled on the line and sent the poem to the editor, I thought it made sense…when it sadly does not.
Brookies are brook trout, by the way, and browns are brown trout.
In any event, whether you write on fish or philosophy, self-deception when revising your work is common. I never come upon the recognition of this fact when reading about revision, except for the rare occasion when Ernest Hemingway’s “built-in bullshit detector” is referred to. You can have a good one and still deceive yourself.
You don’t fully know when it happens, but if you pay attention, you might catch yourself doing it. Most of the time, in my own experience, I catch self-deception a little later, when I go back and re-revise. As you can see from the poem—I haven’t always caught it!
But on a deep level, you know you’re doing it. For me, that’s what was especially maddening about my poem. Going forward, it’s the matter of keeping in touch with myself. Not only have I rewritten the mistaken line since getting it published, I am stoked all the more to do a better job of revision for any of my work!
Here’s how I corrected that line: “Through ceaseless seasonal rounds we will/ never find all the innumerable originals—reddish brookies—/ in pane-enclosed pools. (Browns, bows also breed outside hatcheries.)”