Revision is Your Friend

Hello and Welcome to Sitting in Silence. I’m your stalwart guide to writing, craft, worry, and joy. We just finished Mardi Gras down here. If you didn’t know, Mardi Gras is a kind of revision. A life revision. It doesn’t matter how sideways the prior year went. During Carnival Time, we shake our behinds and lives like a McDonald’s Salad Shaker an Etch a Sketch a Polaroid picture. And just like that, you’re you again. But a brand new you. It’s one of the benefits of being a New Orleans person.

A few things on the personal front. I’ll be back at my favorite writing conference, AWP, next week in Seattle. I’m on two panels, one on writing linked story collections and one on humor in fiction. The great Deesha Philyaw (friend of this newsletter; see her wonderful interview last year) has just joined the latter panel. I’m also doing the off-site Glitterati reading on Saturday night at the Rabbit Box.

Also, I’m teaching a generative class on prose book writing next week. People have liked the earlier classes I taught with The Work Room. If you dream of writing a book or are trying to finish your book, this might be a helpful class for you.

Meanwhile, the New York Times literally called me a Fiction Master, so my work is done. It’s time to put my typewriter in storage and move to a beach somewhere. I kid. I don’t have a typewriter. Also, I have a lot more writing to do.

In fact, I just received the edits to my third book from my editor over at One World Random House. I’m so stoked to get back into it, which is today’s topic: revision.

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Revision is hard. It takes time. We ask the muse to visit us, but she’s away on business. So we languish.

Let me try this instead. Hmmm. Let me try a different version of that intro.

Revision is easy. It takes as long as it takes, which is fine. We don’t really need the muse for this part, but sometimes the muse shows up just to see what we’re up to and before you know it, our work is blossoming in new ways.

Personally, I love revision. Why? Well, while I also love starting a first draft, meeting my protagonist, and working to build out their life and world, on some level I know that my early draft is just a draft. Almost everything I’ve ever published is almost unrecognizable compared to the original.

And this is very exciting to me because it means that somewhere in the writing of those early drafts I found that kernel of interest I really wanted to know more about. Sometimes the stories get longer in revision. Sometimes shorter. When I read Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich for the first time, I was in awe. It’s a long story about a salaryman (like myself at the time) who learns he’s terminally ill and comes to understand that he’s been ignoring his family and wasting his life. This is one of my favorite tropes in story: a shut-off man who examines his life and immediately decides he much make amends by changing himself. (See Ikiru, Living, even A Christmas Carole.) Of course, I immediately, wrote my own knock-off version of Tolstoy’s story because real writers are not influenced by other writers. Amateurs are influenced. Master writers steal. My story was about 45 pages long; it was my longest at that time. It starts with the POV swooping into a church where a funeral is being held. The funeral is for the protagonist (my stand-in; my Ivan). The protagonist’s so-called friends are all sitting in the pews talking about how they plan to exploit his death for their own purposes. I think one of his buddies really wants the dead man’s office desk. It’s gallows humor and played for laughs. But I don’t think I ever really figured out the tone. A large part of the story shows the protagonist running a seemingly endless marathon. This may be a flashback, but we learn that it’s actually his ghost we’ve been following.

I did publish a revision of that story a few years later. It’s called You Can Run. Guess how many pages it is? Three. That’s right. A journal asked me to submit a story. They read it and recommended I make substantial(!) cuts. Instead of being offended, I was intrigued. What would happen if I skinned the apple, then cut away most of the flesh so that we were left with only sweet fruit close to the core? Well, I found out. The published story was nothing like the original drafts. But it was also no longer a knock-off. It was undeniably the work of my hand. It was me focusing on love, mortality, regret, and redemption in a way that I couldn’t have done without making huge cuts and edits.

As I’m revising my current book, I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic. I’m really just here to say don’t fear revision. It’s a writer’s best friend and a place where real joy can be found.