Revision is that other four-letter word that sends us all racing to the pantry for comfort food. English class does us a disservice, I think. From around the first grade, we have our rough drafts, which we write out longhand. They come back to us riddled with red ink: grammar and punctuation errors are highlighted, misspellings marked, sometimes the teacher will ask a question or two. And then we ‘revise’ that draft accordingly and, as we get older, the final paper is usually typed. The end. From that, we come to assume that revision consists of changing a few things here and there. We spruce up the grammar, maybe that character’s motivations are not clearly defined so we add a scene. This is non sequitur. That’s just wrong.
Rarely does a teacher ask their students to trash the whole thing and start over.
But the thing is, you can revise a piece of crap to death. And it will always be a piece of crap. In fact, it gets worse. I have personal experience with this. I’ll write something that I think is wonderful, and someone makes a comment about this, that, or the other. So I change this, that, or the other and resubmit it for critique. Inevitably, something else is off kilter. Again and again. And more often than not it’s the this, that, or the other that I’ve already revised that brings about further critique. It keeps going like that, spiraling down and down and down until the novel is a jumbled mess of other people’s ideals and you really have to dig to find the heart that inspired the writing in the first place.
Hopefully, if the writing is fundamentally wrong from the getgo, you have some advisor who loves you enough to tell you to start over, because sometimes revision is not enough. That advisor again, for me, was Martine Leavitt. She told me to stop revising and to start re-envisioning the project. The heart of the novel really was wonderful; it was the execution that needed work, and work that I was more than capable of doing. If I could only let go (kill my darlings, which will be the topic of the next blog post), believe completely in my own potential to start again, I could create something that was not only wonderful to me, but resonated with a broad spectrum of readers.
I know authors who will write an entire novel, then purposely scrap and bury it so that there’s no way of ever getting it back, and then start the novel again from scratch, only because they’ve learned so much about the characters and plot from that first go-around, they feel the next time through the writing will be that much tighter, their focus so much more clearly defined. And it is.
Think about it. In those home improvement shows that are so popular, you don’t see the designer painting a wall, or buying a new throw pillow and calling it good. They don’t gloss over the ugly and rearrange the furniture. They demolish. They re-envision the space. I’ll be forty-five in a couple weeks. At home our numbers have dropped by half, and the ones that are still here are not as needy as a house full of littles once was (they’re teens so they still act needy, but it’s not the same). That's not just a life revision. I’m this close to being a mother from afar, a mother’s mother or, in my case, a father’s mother. Doing the same things I’ve always done before—that routine—suddenly doesn’t work anymore. This type of life change requires a whopping re-envisioning. Not that what came before was crap, but what you’re left with might feel a bit like that (and this is not a snub to my husband’s good company).
When we don’t just revise, but re-envision, we have a chance at becoming something totally new, exciting and even, possibly, better. The only difference between writing and life is that we’re not scrapping what we’ve already created in life. New phases do not minimize the old. We add upon and add upon and if we’re constantly re-envisioning, someday this book called life is going to be spectacular.
