The Heartful Art of Re-Vision III: The Music of Revision

What follows is Part III of my three-part series on my radical approach to polishing your work and your words. It's an excerpt from a Paris Review interview with Irish author J.P. Donleavy

Scroll to the bottom of the post for links to Parts I and II.


Paris Review: What do you look for when you revise?
J.P. Donleavy: What I look for is a kind of inevitability, the words and sentences falling into an inevitable place that relates to what's gone before and that will presage what follows. ... This is the inevitability -- the words on the page, which lie there naturally, which don't you jar you, and find their own naturalness when they're said or read.
I suppose I think of myself as a sort of scientist, working with words, relating what is going on in my consciousness to what I put on the paper. It's like music . . . an orchestration. As in bell-ringing, when you ring, peal the bells, one echoing sound from one word will echo and sound in another. ... I work a long time on the sound-sense of words.
Occasionally I find myself trapped trying to get the rhythms down properly and sometimes something just won't work. There's one spot in  The Ginger Man  that I've never been able to solve to this day. It isn't perfect. ... In some ways, I was relieved to know, coming back to that passage ten years later and deliberating over it again, that it couldn't be solved even now till this day with what one assumes is one's accumulated masterliness.
Click here for the complete Paris Review interview

The Heartful Art of Revision: A Three-Part SeriesI - Finding the "Vision" in Revision II - A Radical Approach to Editing III - J.P. Donleavy on the Music of Revision
COMING UP NEXT WEEKA two-part series on how to give and receive healthy feedback
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