A Valuable Lesson About Revision

photo by Rami / Flickr

These last few months, I have been busily working on material for Scratch, a digital magazine I’m launching this fall with Manjula Martin. (I’ll be ready to tell you more in a couple weeks.)

I have spent more time rewriting my work than writing it, which I expected. Or, I believe the old adage is true: “Writing is rewriting.”

In his essay for Glimmer Train, Phil Tate discusses a valuable lesson of rewriting, or revision:

Willful expansion adds stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is not, and forcing myself to cut deeply—not only when it was good enough but when it was good—made a stronger, more tightly focused story.

Read Tate’s full essay here. (And stay tuned to Scratch here.)

Other pieces from Glimmer Train this month:

On Being Not a Writer by Xhenet Aliu
A Picture and a Thousand Words by Carrie Brown

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