Here’s what I wrote down: (And don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers below. “I’ve been a rolling-reviser since my earliest writing, back in the Jurassic Era before computers and word processors (and believe me, it is No Fun At All being a rolling-reviser when “cut and paste” means spending half an hour physically cutting your pages apart and then taping them back together with the paragraphs in a different order). Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Understanding the Purpose of Revising and Editing. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You try to say what you have to say more accutately. When I finally reread the typescript, I discover an entirely different text that I often revise further. After completing these revisions, the client should be satisfied. Writers may revise their writing after a draft is complete or during the composing process. After reading the question on writer’s effects (paper 2 question 2), and underlining the key word in each part of the question, return to passage and highlight (possibly in two colours for the two different aspects) the relevant material. It’s standard for freelance writers to complete one round of revision requests for free. I would say I cross out more than I write. Hemingway, on the other hand, notoriously said that the first draft of anything is terrible (he used a less innocuous word). Good writing is essentially rewriting. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be — what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be. Then I make more corrections. Scanning and Selecting. I don’t believe in rewriting this one goddamned story. For short, routine business communications, you may be able to write quite easily with little or no revision. I don’t think, “Okay, I need a scene to do X.” And while trying to be as efficient as you can, you generate a great bulk of material. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind. Usually I’ve reworked the first couple of pages anywhere from twenty to over 100 times by the time I get to the ending. If you’ve written three scenes and each of them does a different thing—explores a different facet of a character, or shows her in relation to different people, or whatever it is—well, if you could have one scene that would do everything at once that those three scenes are doing, then that would be better. And then, if I can, I’ll put it away for a week or two. Now, after the first draft, written by hand and completely scrawled over, I start typing it out, deciphering as I go. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. And the drink loosens me up enough to actually mark it up, you know. It’s stupid to revise it, to me. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that’s revision.” — Neil Gaiman “Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. The editing stage - a process that has left many a talented writer banging their heads against their desks in frustration. Haven’t you ever heard the phrase; the writing is in the rewriting? But yes, I want to get as close as possible to the inexpressible, and yet still communicate. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. When I finally reread the typescript, I discover an entirely different text that I often revise further. My pencils outlast their erasers.” — Vladimir Nabokov, […] Neil Gaiman said, “. I’ll go in and polish it up, and possibly keep playing with it a little—it’s on the computer: everything’s malleable until it’s printed. After all, the most important part of the introduction is the thesis, and so long as that is clearly articulated, we can worry about the rest of the introduction later. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. While you’ll just kind of be tense and not sure. In subsequent visits or drafts, the poems will come into fuller form. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. And it isn’t the way people sometimes paint it—it’s not like you’re at your desk, tearing your hair. It can’t just be a shell of what’s going to be. You must not bend your characters according to some idea you have about how they ought to behave; you’re just letting them be themselves, whatever that is. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. I believe that, for short stories. It gets me past that blank terror.” — Joan Didion in The Paris Review: The Art of Nonfiction No. At the end of the sentence, at the end of the story, or, never? I feel like I start with a tremendous amount of material and just keep boiling it down. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.” — Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on the Writing Life, “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the part you omitted would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” — Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, “And though the rewriting — and the rereading — sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing. Because you don’t edit very dramatically when you’re—you’re not very hard on yourself, you’re not very loose with yourself most of the day. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. These links to point to instruction for higher-order revision, or the substantive re-working of a body of writing. Skip to main content Accessibility help We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a … ... Acclaimed author, experienced editor and mentor Natalie Young, on what writers entering enter into a mentoring program should expect from the process. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. I will take quick fixes if the opportunity arises, but I don’t go looking for them…unless I’m stuck.”, “Before I start to write, the night before—I mean, when I finish work at the end of the day, I go over the pages, the page that I’ve done that day, and I mark it up. We will revise your paper 3 times for free if your revision request follows our main terms: “Writing is rewriting,” says everyone all the time. (I miss Mike Ford. Or more eccentric. I envy those writers who can proceed without correcting.” — Italo Calvino in The Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. Anyone interested in writing clearer, strongeq rnore persuasive and passionate prose, even those of us who are procrastinators panicking because we need to ger a project finished or a paper written and it's 2:00 a.rn. ( Log Out /  Removed about 20 instances of the word “vague” from the book.”. But you have a chance to fix it. On each page I try first to make my corrections with a typewriter; I then correct some more by hand. Out of many, one assumes. Is this all?”  —, “I write by hand, making many, many corrections. Change ). You hope that as you boil down what you have seen and known into your writing, you reduce the best of yourself, too.”. Repeat as necessary?”, “I tell these students there’s no use in revising something that’s bad. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed.” New York Times, The Paris Review: The Art of Nonfiction No. For instance, in the current WIP, I started a new scene in Chapter 11 and a piece of unexpected backstory showed up for one of the characters. The first draft has got to be loaded with most of it. There was no reason not to do a quick search-and-replace, so I did. You try to liberate it. ( Log Out /  Peer collaboration – collaborative writing, peer review, collaborative revision – during which students work together to complete a writing task, to evaluate the writing performance of their classmates, or to revise their written texts jointly, is grounded in the social constructionist theory of learning and the process-based approach to writing (Min, 2005, Shehadeh, 2011). And then I’ll go on to the next thing. … It’s hard to discuss, because it’s always sort of an exploration, and I usually don’t even know for a very long time, what it is that I’m exploring. If I am not happy with a line before a reading, I’ll gladly edit the text in my book so that I’ll feel comfortable reading it to an audience. Not look at it. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes – ‘ideas for stories.’ Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly – in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Jack Kerouac famously wrote On The Road in 3 weeks, typing it on a 120-foot roll of paper without stopping to review it. Theoretically, I could have made a note to “Change Ch 2 conversation between A and B to reflect backstory from Ch 11 p.1” and gone on working on Chapter 11…except that I couldn’t. Often the page becomes so unreadable that I type it over a second time. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of ”literature” in your head, is formidable, intimidating. Professional Writers and Revision 119 a stronger draft. Novice writers seldom have sufficient strategies avail-able to make such a shift possible. I think it’s got to be exciting.”, Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Put [the story] in a drawer and write other things. When do you return to something you wrote to revise, edit or re-write? Or more eccentric. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed.” New York Times, “The best advice I can give on this is, once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Today Make a Scene launches its "Writers on Revisions" series, which will go on for several weeks. Oh, I could force myself another couple of sentences forward, but none of them felt right. You try to be true to a world. 1. If the first draft is no goddamned good, it’s no good. A plunge in an icy lake. It’s illuminating, and I wound up digging around on the Internet for more personal stories of editing strategies, investigating the revision processes of a number of celebrated contemporary writers of fantasy, realism, and young adult fiction. A plunge in an icy lake. They may also make unreasonable demands, such as asking for an extra 400 words. Once I sense some answers, the poems will develop their own identity and the theme/obsessions of my work will rise to the surface in more realized poems. So why is A talking and reacting as if he/she doesn’t know it?”). So you compress, the same way that to make something very tasty you might reduce a sauce. My novel Hello to the Cannibals was almost 1,000 pages in manuscript—the exact count was 967. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing… My pages are always covered with canceling lines and revisions. Sometimes the only pleasurable parts. There was a time when I made a number of handwritten drafts. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. Decided to just tweak it a little instead. A painting covers its tracks. On each page I try first to make my corrections with a typewriter; I then correct some more by hand. Text and language is alive so it’s always changing. 2. A lot of us get into the habit of “tacking on” our introduction and conclusion after writing the body of the paper. You need to start somewhere. We are always ready to revise your paper if it does not entirely meet your specifications. “For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. I am positive of this.” — Roald Dahl, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. So there’s a tremendous amount of exorcising that I do, carving away. So I decided to take some notes on what exactly I did over the course of a night’s revision. 6. And from there, I see those risks being taken in multiple writing settings: in whole class revision exercises, in workshops, in conferences, and in individual revision time. Nowadays, my creativity is summoned within a two-hour time span. Looked at all instances of the word “bustle” in the book to see if I’m overusing the word. The Writing Center Campus Box #5135 0127 SASB North 450 Ridge Road Chapel Hill, NC 27599 (919) 962-7710 writing_center@unc.edu I sometimes have many pages of text. You need to start somewhere. Poets & Writers Live is an initiative developed in response to interviews and discussions with writers from all over the country. As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head. Craft Capsule: The Art of Targeted Revision | Poets & Writers Introduction. I once had long, languid days that unfurled in one fluid gesture of creation. Over the course of the next couple of months I’ll see a relationship among my poems and I’ll ask them what they are saying to one another. Changed a curse to be more culturally appropriate for the person using it. I don’t go in for that sort of thing:). So I went back and spent ten minutes fiddling with the conversation in Chapter 2, so that the reactions and the dialog were consistent with the backstory in Chapter 11 (not revealing it, but also not something that a reader would hit on their second time through and go “Hey, doesn’t it turn out later that A knows B’s secret? You try to say what you have to say more accutately. Now, after the first draft, written by hand and completely scrawled over, I start typing it out, deciphering as I go. While the thesis is undeniably a key element, that does not mean that the rest of the first paragraph is just a container for the thesis. Often, I’ll have a scene of people having a conversation in a room. An important part of the writing process is revision, especially as it differs from editing. Many writers go through multiple rounds of revisions before they reach a final draft: [1] "Few writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try. Things that are broken become very obvious suddenly. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. I write each draft, each scene, over and over again until I can’t think of a better way forward. 1. Revision. It is part of my process because my backbrain simply will not cooperate if it isn’t really, really sure that what I have already written is a solid foundation for whatever is currently at the leading edge of the story. It gets me into a rhythm. Many writers are not even sure what they are writing about until they have a first draft. When do you return to something you wrote to revise, edit or re-write? Revision, revision, revision: the term is nearly a mantra in Comm-B and Writing-Intensive (WI) courses. Recursive revision strategy involves a first draft that are messy but that express what they will write about, and a second draft which will be figured out what will be kept and what will be changed in the essay (82). Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss—whose Kingkiller Chronicle is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn’t heard—in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a … Then I make more corrections. But what they don’t say, necessarily, is how. Considered modifying the POV in a particular scene. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. You try to be clearer. I'm embarking on a novel revision, and rather than jumping off into that terrifying place alone, I wanted to bolster my process with words of advice from published authors and… That is, I try not to bring too many ideas about what the story is doing etc, etc. Skim reading (Read passage to get a sense of time, place, topic, genre, tone and atmosphere.) For editing/proofreading resouces, see here. Reconsidered changing POV in same scene as before. “It’s easy to say “write truthfully about experience.” But how to actually do it? Really, I have found the drink actually helps.”. “Revision is the spiritual practice of transformation—of seeing text, and therefore the world, with new eyes. In other words, read along with a red pen, reacting in real-time as I go along, deleting, adding, etc. Or deeper. It’s hard to figure out how much I eliminate—often it’s more that I’m switching out or reworking phrases or sentences or paragraphs (rarely scenes).”. Does it not? Then it turns out it’s either the wrong people or the wrong room, and I just have to keep going about it until I find the right people and the right room. But you have a chance to fix it. We forget that all published books are the results of multiple rewrites and edits. If you do that, and you’re faithful to it, you’ve got a shot at writing something true. I would say I cross out more than I write. Decided against it. While I was back there, I tightened up some other parts of the conversation and added some stage business, neither of which was strictly necessary to get that bit of backstory in, but as long as I was there and saw the opportunity, I just did it. When we asked what Poets & Writers could do to support their writing practice, time and again writers expressed a desire for a more tangible connection to other writers. Though I’ll generally have a vague outline in mind, I’ll feel it through rather than take a pre-planned course. Whether it’s about revision, re-writing or omission (knowing what to leave out), the next time you want to have another go at your work, these 13 great writers will show you how it’s done. About That Wave of Anti-Racist Bestsellers Over the Summer... A new library built in honor of Haruki Murakami will open in 2021. 2. The discardable chapters are on the left.” — Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, “I write by hand, making many, many corrections. Once I disliked a Sandman story on proofreading it so much that I asked if it could be pulled and buried and was told no, it couldn’t, which is why the world got to read the Emperor Norton story, “Three Septembers and a January,” although I no longer have any idea why I thought it was a bad story, and I’m pleased that Tom Peyer ignored my yelps.”. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You read the sentences over and over. The three groups of university students (N My process has changed tremendously since I’ve had my children. I did not go over the whole scene looking for other potential revisions, and the whole fix didn’t take more than ten minutes to do and get back to work on the leading edge of the story. And I mark it up and leave it until the morning, and then I make the corrections in the morning, which gives me a way to start the day… I can have a drink at night. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”, “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the part you omitted would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” —, “And though the rewriting — and the rereading — sound like effort, they are actually the most pleasurable parts of writing. To have a more efficient and more intense fragment is going to be better. Personally, I think you learn more from finishing things, from seeing them in print, wincing, and then figuring out what you did wrong, than you could ever do from eternally rewriting the same thing. ( Log Out /  Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing…, My pages are always covered with canceling lines and revisions. You try to be true to a world. 7. ( Log Out /  Revision is closely related to editing . Still, you aren’t the first person to ask about this. But that’s me, and I came from comics where I simply didn’t have the liberty of rewriting a story until I was happy with it, because it needed to be out that month, so I needed to get it more or less right first time. You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be — what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be. Is this the book I’m writing? Research has consistently shown that the best, most experienced writers regularly revise their writing in substantive ways. He was the sharpest of all of them—saved me from making a fool of myself half a dozen times.) “Every writer has their own way of doing things. I don’t think poems are ever finished. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. Those notes will then find their way into poems by evening. Novice writ-ers, experienced writers, aJl writers. At Guru-writers.com we take pride in providing prime-quality academic assistance. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.”  — Joyce Carol Oats, “I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. There was a time when I made a number of handwritten drafts. To me, there is no end point and that is a joy. The impulse, of course, is try to be faithful to what you initially had in mind—but the process, instead, calls for you to let go of all of your opinions, and all the things you think you think. These are very, very long stories that I write, but you could also call them extremely condensed novels. You try to be clearer. Setting out to write, if you have the idea of ”literature” in your head, is formidable, intimidating. It includes adding or deleting paragraphs, changing the organization of points in the paper, adding more support, clarifying ideas, etc. Instead, revision is where an author refines the ideas … Is this the book I’m writing? Recursive revision strategies are used by the Experienced writers in Sommer’s essay. 130, 1992, “More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. Or more eloquent. Indeed, the university criteria for Comm-B and Writing-Intensive courses mandate that instructors build the revision process into their courses—and for good reason. Though some have pointed out that this is not entirely true, as Kerouac had reworked the book many times over several years – it would be more accurate to say he typed it up in 3 weeks. I will keep mental notes during the day as I run around playgrounds and do the laundry. I can let everything else go (I didn’t have to tighten the rest of the conversation or add the stage business). Some writers, such as Toni Morrison, say that they revise a piece to make it shorter and more focused; others revise a text to make it longer, adding examples, evidence, and descriptive detail to help the reader follow the discussion, argument, or narrative. This is the only way it works for me.”, “I try to base my revision on a re-reading of what I’ve done so far, imitating, so far as it’s possible, a first-time reader. Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit… Let’s say it’s a mess. Often the page becomes so unreadable that I type it over a second time. What writers need is revision. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. And then I could go on. I can only talk about *my* revision process, because that’s the only one I know. Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss—whose Kingkiller Chronicle is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn’t heard—in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a single night. I admit that this is a self-serving project. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.” — John Irving, “’A Fair Maiden’ existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. But still, that’s quite a feat! At the end of the sentence, at the end of the story, or, never? A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just need to get it down. I realized instantly that a) this was a really cool idea and fit right into the story and solved a bunch of plot problems, and b) if this backstory was true, a character back in Chapter 2 should have reacted very differently during their conversation. Start by getting something – anything – down on paper. You’ve got to go on down, as Robert Penn Warren used to say, into the cave. Looked at my use of the word “vague” to see if I’ve been using it too much. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. We have all made the mistake of reading something wonderful, and sighing with dismay: ‘I’ll never write this well,’ we think to ourselves, sulking for the rest of the day. It’s brief, very brief, from four to twelve pages, getting something done. Then comes the warm part: when you already have something to work with, upgrade, edit… Let’s say it’s a mess. I’ll try and read it aloud the next time I do a reading, in order to find out what I can about it, including places where what I wrote was not what I meant, and I’ll fix what I find. Revising and editing allow you to examine two important aspects of your writing separately, so that you can give each task your undivided attention. REVISION STRATEGIES. Jack Kerouac famously wrote On The Road in 3 weeks, typing it on a 120-foot roll of paper without stopping to review it. This study investigated discourse level revising skills among three groups of Japanese EFL writers and the relationship between these skills and the two factors of English proficiency and writing experience. Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway, Elif Shafak on What It Means to Belong in Many Places at Once, François Vigneault on Italo Calvino, Ursula K. LeGuin, and the Moomins, Jane Smiley on Five Zola Novels About Paris, Jean-Patrick Manchette: Inside the Decades-Long Effort to Bring a Master of French Crime Fiction to American Readers, A P.I. Revision Policy. Painters work from the ground up. You try to liberate it. Unfortunately, some clients require multiple rounds of revision requests. I then type furiously. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers Nancy Sommers Although various aspects of the writing process have been studied exten- sively of late, research on revision has been notably absent. Try to forget about it. But I wrote it five separate times. Sometimes the only pleasurable parts. Writers differ on how often or when they take a second, third, fifteenth look at what they’ve written, but they all agree on the importance of multiple drafts. “In a first-draft situation for me, it’s a visceral rather than an intellectual process. Things undergo many, many, many revisions. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just need to get it down. The resulting revision was issued as the Revised Version in 1881 (New Testament), 1885 (Old Testament) and 1894 (Apocrypha); but, although it sold widely, the revision did not find popular favour, and it was only reluctantly in 1899 that Convocation approved it for reading in churches. Nancy Sommer realized a research for 3 years in which she examined the revision process of student writers and experienced writers, during this process she redefined the revision process as, “A sequence of changes in a composition – changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work (380).” The only way I’ve ever known is to try it, over and over again, until I can’t think of another way, or a clearer way. (James Dickey used to call it “the cave of making.”) You enter the cave of making without any opinions, without any preconceived notions, and tell the story as clearly as you can. All professional and academic writers revise, and for many the revision process takes longer than it took to write the first draft. 1, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” — Elmore Leonard, “It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. Spent some time figuring out the particular mechanisms of sygaldry to prevent consistency problems.