Back when I was a summer camp counselor, I had one of Phil Donahue’s kids among my assigned campers. On parents’ night, he advised me to revise, revise, revise, as he was doing as a newscaster. And then he turned into a hot syndicated talk-show host.
It took me a while to appreciate his counsel, along with the adage, “Talent goes into the first draft, genius goes into the revision.”
Originally, my feelings about revision were like those regarding playing musical scales, relegating the practice to a secondary status nay nuisance. It took me a long time to appreciate doing it as a practice in itself rather than as a prelude to the primary action.
Indeed, more than once I’ve discovered a better novel buried under the first draft. Or perhaps lurking in its bones, waiting for release, akin to Michaelangelo’s block of marble.
It’s never easy, though. Thorough revision takes longer than the draft did, and that’s for each sweep. The fact remains that multiple deep revisions will be required.
One of the places it engages me is the use of synonyms. I’ve come to rely on a thesaurus more than some other writers, and doing so comes with a caution. While it increases the vocabulary count and possibly adds words a reader doesn’t know, I feel it allows me to unpack dimensions of a central word or phrase that keeps repeating in a long work. In my case, there are usually 20 or so in each piece, and I find them cloying. Take the term “revision,” which turns out to include amendment, reconsideration, modification, adjustment, alteration, change, correction, improvement as its shadings. It’s much more thorough than typical editing.
In some of my manuscripts, the revisions demanded I change the tense throughout, as well as the point of view – third person to first to second, for example. The genders of key characters even flipped.
With ebooks, I’ve even replaced the titles and characters’ names.
~*~
While I had done major revisions on Subway Hitchhikers from its inception to the breakthrough publication, the manuscript had also grown blubbery with backstory and detail in the in-between stages. My revisions occurred in sweeps in my moves from Ohio to Indiana to Washington state back to Iowa and another corner of Ohio and finally Baltimore, adding backstory and explanation before landing on the butcher block that produced a lacy, playful ride through the imagination.
Still, that process was nothing like what happened after my move to New Hampshire and had a computer to work from. I can’t imagine trying to retype so many pages on paper, nor did I have the funds to hire a typist for the pile of drafts in front of me. Remember the poor starving artist image?
When Hitchhikers came out, I had been in New Hampshire three years.
I had all that excess from its intervening years and saw promise for several new books in those pages. I took them back to the drawing board.
Emotionally, I was going through a long recovery period, including therapy – self-induced depression, as I quipped. In the process, I was learning to take feelings more seriously, and that extended to my revisions. What was the underlying feeling in a particular line or scene, rather than simply the action or physical detail? That sort of thing.
At least I once again had mountains at hand, abetted this time by the Atlantic, and even a boss with a sailboat for some of my initial outings.
With a pile of drafts already keyboarded, I could pick up a section in any available time and work away to make it somehow better.
This was when I really began to appreciate the importance of deep revision. Not just the superficial polishing to make a story read more clearly, but transformations to probe into underlying events. I was examining much that I had experienced in my life without fully seeing what was happening at the time. Some of these were shared by many in my generation. Some by kindred spirits who were simply somewhere out of the spotlight. And some were essential unique and personal.
~*~
As I reflect on the revision process here, I ask about what was going on in the background. Remarrying grounded me, for certain, and gave me a sounding board for troubling passages. As I’ve joked, everything before that now became ancient history, including the substance of the lingering novels.
What, if anything, was playing in the background as I worked in the top-floor next, my not-quite Fortress of Solitude? Kronos Quartet, late Miles Davis, or the Shostakovich preludes and fugues might give me a different ambiance than Bach organ works or Beethoven – some inclination for edginess or gravity, depending. If someone was in the bedroom on the other half of the top floor could have an impact, too, if only by limiting by space to pace within.
The view outside, the weather, even the season of the year?
So far, I haven’t heard any discussions about the practice of revising, certainly not along the scale of drafting. I’m coming to think of it as living with a project, the way you would with a kid in the household, knowing vaguely that at some point they’re going to grow up and leave.
Jnana's Red Barn 