9 Key Questions and 26 Craft Keys for Revising our Writing to be Stronger, Clearer & More alive
From the Archive | "Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via ... thousands of incremental adjustments" ~George Saunders on the art of revision
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Yesterday, a writer emailed me about revision (hi, Monica!).
She said:
I was wondering if you would be willing to create—or, if it already exists, re-post on an archive day—a writing prompt for playing around with words already written; or, ideas regarding how to use some of your existing writing prompts for revision rather than generation…. Of course, revision still requires generation, so maybe it's just about being more strategic when generating new words from your prompts (am I answering my own question by writing this email?).
I have a stockpile of so many words and I am trying to shift my attention to this back catalog. Any insight on this process that you could share via WITD would be much appreciated.I'm sure this will be a part of SCHOOL, too, so maybe I am just getting ahead of myself.
The truth is, I love (love love love) revision. I teach a workshop called Radical Revision. I love talking to other writers about revision, and yes, we will definitely do some exploration of revision during WITD: THE SCHOOL. Revision is the bulk of writing. The truth, though, is that revision is the bulk of writing. It’s the entire afternoon (and evening and night) of writing.
Drafting, as we know, is only the beginning, the bright shiny morning of writing, where anything can happen, all doors are open (which yes, is sometimes scary, yes, because openness can be scary), and nothing should be judged. We should be playful, a little feral, and willing to do weird things on the page. The morning of writing is like an amusement park where you also never know when you might enter the funhouse.
Whereas the afternoon of writing (and the evening, and the night) are where the sleeves get rolled up and another kind of work begins, the work of making something out of whatever we conjured in the morning, something someone else might recognize as meaningful, evocative, and true.
So, not surprisingly, it turns out I do have an archival post on revision, which I’m sharing below. I also have the following links that deal with revision:
The Importance of Teeth in The Art of Revision
The Uninvited Guest (a strange technique for radical revision!)
This archival post was originally published last January.
What do writers really do when they revise? And how to do we know when a thing is done? We talked about that a lot in Week Twelve of the Essay Challenge, “The Importance of Teeth in the Art of Revision.”
George Saunders, one of the best living writers of our time, has said that revision is a lot like love.
I agree with this.
Saunders also said, in describing his process of writing and revision for The Guardian several years ago, that the writing process, from draft to revision to completion, is “a beautiful, mysterious experience” that he finds himself craving “while, at the same time, flinching at the thousands of hours of work it will take to set such a machine in motion again.”
But Saunders ultimately feels that this iterative process of writing and revision is a hopeful act. Why? He says:
There is something wonderful in watching a figure emerge from the stone unsummoned, feeling the presence of something within you, the writer, and also beyond you – something consistent, willful, and benevolent, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground.
In the live, synchronous version of the Writing in the Dark workshop, we have, over the course of several years, created a running list of questions and craft keys to bear in mind while we are engaging with our own work and the work of others to make it better. A writer recently asked my permission to share this list in a class she’s teaching—and I realized you all might appreciate it, too.
So far, we’ve identified 9 Questions for Close Reading and 26 Craft Keys to Consider when assessing our work or the work of others for opportunities to make it stronger, clearer, and more alive.
Surely this is only a sampling, necessarily incomplete.
Nonetheless, I hope you find these questions and keys as useful as we have in the live workshop. To note, many dozens of published pieces have resulted from using this process, pieces that have found homes in beautiful journals from Brevity to Calyx to Fourth Genre to Hippocampus to Manifest Station to North American Review and many, many more.
I’d love to hear your own additions/suggestions to the following Questions and Craft Keys—please share in the comments! And if you have questions about the lists, I’d love to hear those as well. We’re building this ship together as we sail it, and that’s such a cool feeling.
Share your thoughts in the comments. ❤️