Rewriting/Revision

From Jane Friedman’s blog — Free Yourself from Rewriting Paralysis

So, recently, two different people commented to me that until they heard me talk about revision, they sort of thought that authors just threw a mass of words on the page and boom! Done! And I laughed. I’m not sure I ever had that impression, but if I did, it was so long ago that it’s lost in the mists of time. I just accept as part of the process that revision will take from 50% as long to about 100% as long as writing the draft. (Or sometimes a lot more than that, I guess.) (Which I do not enjoy.)

I like the grace that George Saunders confers on the discomfort of rewriting: “An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.” He continues with a useful metaphor:

The artist…is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?…As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading.

I don’t know about more sane or less misleading. I would say —

It becomes more effective.

It carries more punch.

It becomes more evocative.

It contributes to rhythm.

It sounds right.

I do think that this metaphor about optometry is great. “Is it better like this? Or like this? … Like this? Or like this?” That’s entertainingly accurate. How many of you went to an optometrist over and over as a kid? I was farsighted, my vision kept changing, my glasses kept needing to be adjusted, that went on until my vision shifted into the normal range when I was in my late teens, and I can easily close my eyes and imagine myself in that chair, with the optometrist flipping from one lens to another.: “Which is better? This? Or this?”

Honestly, that is a lot like revising a specific sentence or paragraph. Which is better? This? Or this? Should this passage be one paragraph, or three? Should this be two sentences, or combined with a conjunction? A conjunction here, or a semicolon? Is it better like this? Or like this? I like that a lot.

Here is the article from which that metaphor was drawn:  George Saunders: what writers really do when they write.

Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments. The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?

The interesting thing, in my experience, is that the result of this laborious and slightly obsessive process is a story that is better than I am in “real life” – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.

I wouldn’t say that’s interesting … fine, okay, maybe it’s interesting, but it also seem inevitable. Obviously if you could edit your personal interactions in the real world through a zillion little incremental adjustments, those interactions would turn out better. Hopefully funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathic … good heavens, I’m describing Groundhog Day, and right here in February, too! That’s very suitable, and this is such a great movie, I should get out my DVD and watch it again, even though I missed February 2nd.

But back to Saunder’s linked post:

When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.

But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to “grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice”. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to “me, on a different day”.

This is a great article! I’m glad the post at Friedman’s blog led me to it.

But why did I make those changes? On what basis? On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. … This is a hopeful notion, because it implies that our minds are built on common architecture – that whatever is present in me might also be present in you. … when you start crying at the end of Tolstoy’s story “Master and Man”, you have proved that we have something in common, communicable across language and miles and time, and despite the fact that one of us is dead. Another reason you’re crying: you’ve just realised that Tolstoy thought well of you – he believed that his own notions about life here on earth would be discernible to you, and would move you.

Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion.

By all means, click through and read the whole thing.

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