Dangers of Revising:

We tell ourselves as writers that this is how it works to write a book:

1. Write a crappy first draft.
2. Get some feedback on it.
3. Revise it.
4. Get more feedback.
5. Revise it again.

Which isn’t untrue, but sometimes I think it feels more like this:

1. Write a crappy first draft.
2. Despair that it will never be any better and put it away.
3. Try writing another crappy first draft.
4. Decide to go back to the first crappy first draft because it seems better.
5. It isn’t better, but at least it’s finished.
6. Ask for feedback.
7. Reread notes on feedback and realize that people are telling you completely different things to fix, and that you could go off in at least six different directions.
8. Try to make everyone happy.
9. Get more feedback. Everyone hates it and tells you to go back to the first version.
10. You give up and move onto the next book, because this one CANNOT BE FIXED.

If you haven’t been through this process at least once, I don’t believe you’re a real writer.

I was with a great writer’s group for years, and I improved for a long time. And then I stopped improving. I started using the comments of the other writers as a Bible rather than as guidelines. I took too many notes, and I heard their voices in my head as I revised. This was not their problem, really. It was mine, but the only way I was able to fix it was to stop going to a writer’s group for several years.

The problem is that when you hear feedback from people, especially from other writers, you are likely to hear a lot of—this is what I do when my book has that problem. Which makes sense, right? I mean, how else do you offer advice except by using your own experience as an example?

But the best teachers of writing are the ones who see what you are trying to write and show you how to do it better. Not how to be them. They strip your work down to some basic parts and show you how to play with those. They don’t take away anything that matters to the piece and somehow, they manage to keep what makes your piece unique while also making it better.

This is nearly impossible. Really, I don’t think we realize how difficult it is to do this. You have to be not only a superb writer, but a well-read writer. Someone who understands many different kinds of forms, voices, and stories. You have to be able to be humble enough to realize that not every book is a book that you could write. There are wonderful books that don’t appeal to you at all. And yet you must learn how to help someone else write a perfect book that is not your kind of book. How many writers are this smart and humble—and care enough to learn this skill? Not many.

The wrong kind of writing teacher teaches you not how to write your own book better, but how to write like everyone else. And this is tragic. I’ve seen this all too often. Someone who writes a quirky, unique book, and it is “critiqued” or “edited” by the wrong person and ends up being something that almost anyone could have written. Sure, it has the edges knocked off so that it might appeal to a wider audience. Only it doesn’t really appeal to anyone anymore because the passion is gone out of it.

If you feel like this has happened to you as a writer, my advice is to let the piece sit for 6-12 months and come back to it with fresh eyes. Even that is sometimes not long enough to fall back in love with what was going right in a piece.

The worst risk of revision is always that you will end up abandoning a piece completely because you lost the part of yourself that wrote it. I don’ t know how to get that back. I know there are some writers who claim that they never give up on a piece of writing.

I am a little envious of this, because I feel like those writers have more confidence—or something—than I do. I give up on books. A lot. I forget what it was I was doing when I talk to too many people about my book, and that is something that I have begun to guard a little more closely against. Maybe it sounds like a superstition, but I believe too many eyes on a book takes something away from it.