How to Approach Revision
And how to know when you’ve gone off track
Image credit: Vyacheslav Argenberg
Recently, I asked a client who has just started writing poems to bring in some revisions. “I’m terrified” he said. It was a good reminder of how revision can feel when you are new to writing. I quickly backtracked and suggested that before we start revision, we work on building up a body of work. It’s a lot less scary to scrutinize an individual poem when you’ve written 10, 20, or 50.
At the next session, he brought a fantastic, unique poem that played with form and expectations. I told him how great I thought his poem was and exactly why. Then we looked at the second to last stanza, where something was unclear. “One idea,” I told him, “would be to use the line breaks to clarify the meaning.” I showed him what I meant and he got excited and quickly re-wrote the stanza. At the next session, I pointed out to him that he had now done revision.
Revising, when it’s going well, is just an extension of that initial spark that drove the first draft—though more contemplative. It’s a kind of experimentation where you say “I wonder what would happen if I took out this word” or “What if I started this essay with this paragraph in the middle?” You might also challenge yourself—to shorten the piece by half, to add more action sequences, whatever you know the piece needs. The driving feeling should be curiosity and it should feel good.
You know revision has gone off track when you start making choices without any real feeling behind them—or with fear, anxiety, constriction, or embarrassment as the driving force. When you get stuck taking out a phrase, putting it back in, then taking it out again, you’ve drifted away from your internal compass that tells you what feels right. That’s when you put the work away before you cut it to pieces.
Your next step can be to come back to the piece when you are feeling more confident or to ask a trusted friend, writing group, or writing mentor to reflect back to you what’s there. This is not the time for a tear-down critique, but to re-orient yourself to the original insight or question that drove the writing. It is a good idea to ask people directly to tell you what is working in the piece before going into any criticism. It is also a good idea to know what you like about the piece, or what you excited about turning it into.
Learning to revise is like learning to drive a large ocean vessel. At first turning the wheel can feel terrifying. But after a while, you learn how the ship’s controls work. You play with cutting, expanding, rearranging, and improving your work at the sentence level. As you learn more about your craft, you have more and more tools available to you, and you find you are able to steer into deeper and deeper waters.
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