Let me confess to the allure of having an author’s photo and bio blip on the back dust jacket of a hardback volume. That’s always carried so much more gravitas than a mere newspaper byline – in my early days reserved only for major stories rather than distributed to just about every headlined item, in part to shift the blame for errors – or, one step up, the columnist’s thumbnail mug shots, for the truly honored writers. A magazine’s contributors page was a step up, especially when they included a full-color photo.

It’s not that being honored was essential – I was an anonymous, behind-the-scenes copy editor, after all – but more an acknowledgment of success, especially when it signified not being a hack. It’s just that everyone harbors a desire to be important, at least to someone, right?

~*~

For me, having the manuscripts but working on them part-time, I sensed myself racing a ticking clock. Would time run out on me?

The book publishing world was shrinking, as was daily newspaper journalism that provided my paychecks. Fewer houses were publishing fiction, and even those were in turmoil. They wanted blockbusters rather than the cottage-industry lines that previously prevailed.

Literary agents were struggling to support the writers they had and were less likely to take on new clients who would require more time and effort to promote. One, who had been considered hot just the previous year, replied to my query – a rarity, by the way – saying my proposal was an important book but not “commercially viable.” Another, equally acclaimed, vented her frustration with the changing publishing world and her struggles to cope within it.

Well, it did remind me of a letter I received from a newspaper editor I greatly admired during one of my job-hunting interludes. He was warm and welcoming, but confessed his career had turned into heading papers through their final days. From what I saw, he did manage some glorious sunsets.

My personal writing turned to several nonfiction projects that had commercial potential, but they, too, failed to break through the brick wall. One problem was that I was only a writer rather than an expert with academic or other highly placed credits.

It was a vicious circle. To get published, you had to have been published to some success.

~*~

It paralleled my earlier efforts to land a position on a major metropolitan newspaper. There had been some near misses, but the Union Leader proved to be a better fit for my remaining career. I even made it to the finishing line in a rapidly shrinking field.

In addition, “making it” as a poet was looking more and more like a dead end. Who can even name a living poet?

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.

Isn’t it obvious, one word at a time? Except it’s more complicated than that, and every writer approaches the deed differently.

I would like to approach a writing project the way Neal Welliver did his large-scale paintings, starting in the upper left-hand corner and finishing in the lower right. He worked with a tightly defined palate, too. Instead, I wind up more like Mark Rothko, painting over earlier parts, adding or scraping off layers – what’s known as “painterly.”

For novelists, the difference is posed as “outliner,” meaning someone who starts out with an outline and pretty much sticks with it, versus a “pantser,” going by the seat-of-the-pants with perhaps a vague sense of a destination, which may very well change en route.

You can guess which camp I’m in. As another artist put it, what’s the point of putting all that work in if you already know the ending?

For the record, I hated outlining when it was assigned as school homework. It seemed redundant.

~*~

I don’t like formal prompts, by the way. Instead, I often start with something that keeps nagging at me, the way the flash of a trackside worker in Brooklyn – a gandy dancer – turned into a subway line hitchhiker. (Maybe that third element, the unique word, turned the trick.)

As a project percolates, so do related ideas during the rest of my day, leading to piles of scribbled notes to weave in. When I lived in New Hampshire’s seacoast region and worked in Manchester, I had an hour commute in each direction, largely through rural country. I kept a notebook and pen at hand as I drove. Likewise, some of my favorite lines in What’s Left came to mind while swimming laps in the city’s indoor pool. As soon as I was back in the locker room, I was scribbling. Getting up from the keyboard every hour or so, sometimes adding a short walk, also works wonders. As a journalist, some of my best headlines came on my way to the men’s room or back.

Much of my writing then becomes the way of connecting two thoughts or flashes.

Outtakes from other projects also get recycled, though they rarely wind up quite how they began. I’ve drawn heavily from correspondence, maps, and photos as well, as well as silent meditation. As has been said, some of the best barns in New England were designed in Quaker Meeting, and it is amazing how many problems get worked out by stepping away from them.

~*~

As much as I’ve longed for an editor or a partner truly in sync with what I’m about, that hasn’t been the case, not since my first lover, back in college. Instead, I’ve been a lone ranger. It’s meant putting big projects aside for several months or even years before coming back to them afresh.

~*~

There are also the epiphanies when a character starts dictating the story, as well as the times of slogging through mud.

I should also mention learning from other writers, especially by example.

~*~

Determining when a work is finished is usually a mystery. My high school art teacher used to say I either stopped too so or else overworked a piece. I’d prefer too soon, since my usual taste leans toward austere. Think Quaker, Shaker, or Zen.

Another answer would be that I stop when I have nothing more to say on the project, for now. Or, as I’ve heard elsewhere, when the writer just gets tired of it.

As a newsman, a more common answer was the arrival of a deadline.