Reading through all these posts on revision, I am struck by how similar we creative writers seem to be at heart. We despise revision; we need it; we yearn for it; we avoid it; we bite the bullet and go through with it; we think it's bullshit; we see it gets results; we see that revision is the key to all of our future dreams of excellence; we still despise it, despite it.
With all of these collective mixed feelings about revision, I had to look deep into my own heart and face the truth of revision for myself: it's really only something I practice on school assignments for class. Because something is due. At this point in my life, the sad truth is, I just don't have the time or energy to go through each and every one of my millions of Word files saved on hard drives, floppy discs, CD-ROMs, or even email messages. I don't have the heart to revise.
Revision is much like declaring war on an enemy in a political sense, except that the enemy is actually your own writing, and you are supposed to love your writing. This is hard because, in a war, you are supposed to hate your enemy. And often, your own writing feels so much like an enemy, trying to sabotage you, trying to take all of your resources. To revise is to commit yourself utterly to the drab and depressing fate of searching endlessly for the perfect comma, the perfect word, the perfect sentence structure. To seek that right line in the right spot in the right paragraph is difficult at best; to find that perfect word for the sentence is even harder. To go back in time and memory to try and remember just what your thought process was when you wrote a garbled paragraph is a nauseating affair; we have all been there, trying to fix a continuity mistake and realizing, there is no way to fix this without having to tear it all out and start back from scratch.
Perhaps I speak only for my own self, but revision is a scary process that is best handled with a vice of some sort: caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate... whatever floats your boat. Anything to help pass those hours in front of a computer screen, trying to make the puzzle pieces of your literary genius fit together.
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Great post Anna. Wouldn't even have blinked if I'd read it in the course reader.
ReplyDeleteI definitely have an opposite experience with revision: I do it constantly, almost obsessively. Probably a result of low self esteem or something. For me every word is precious because I feel like it could be the last good one I'll ever write. Like I could have passed my prime already or something.
Anyway, I don't think mine is a particularly healthy approach, and if you're feeling capable, why NOT use this time in your life to create? Supposedly this is when the brain is most willing to find new connections and solve problems in novel ways.
So yeah, fuck rewriting stories, just write new ones.