In writing as in life, we fear to excise what we treasure—or what we have treasured.

But we also learn to become survivors of our own choices

John Irving once confessed, *“Half my life is an act of revision.” This is true for me, as well—and I am dearly glad for it. After all, to revise is to live twice—to offer our mistakes a second breath, and ourselves a second birth.

To be clear, revision, in the sense that I use the word, is not editing. Editing is fixing up what’s there, whereas revision is reimagining what’s there in the light of what it might become, what it might be if it could ever reach its own outer limits. From the original Latin, revision is, literally, seeing again.

When taken up in earnest, revision is far from a dull chore. It’s inventive. It’s courageous. It can even be fierce. And it’s definitely where the magic happens, where we learn to radically transform our work. I say radically, because when approached with genuine openness, even a seemingly small changes, such as beginning the story somewhere else, or deleting a cherished scene, or switching from past to present tense or first to third person or vice versa, can have truly dramatic consequences (including making the difference between a rejection or an acceptance when the time comes).¹

When we dig into rewriting what we’ve already written, rewriting with a willingness to make real changes (including sacrifices), we gain the muscle to adapt, redirect, and reinvent—not just on the page, but in every facet of our lives.

Revision as a practice of truly seeing again can feel both violent and tender. We all know Stephen King’s quote about killing our darlings, about cutting our stories to the bone. And countless other writers have said their own versions of the same thing—we have to be willing to delete, cut, and change the work—even the parts we love best. But in writing as in in life, we fear to excise what we treasure—or what we have treasured. We fear change and the risk of the unknown. That fear is understandable! Why would we not be afraid of drastic rearranging? And not necessarily because of what might be lost, but, also because of what. might be discovered.

Seeing again means seeing anew, and when we see anew, we risk the possibility of understanding our story, ourselves, our lives differently.

Moments of potential major revision in life place us at the complex intersection of who we were, who we are, and who we might become. And there is nothing, nothing like writing creatively about our lives to help us clarify our direction as we stand trembling at these thresholds.

As Fanny Howe said:

One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. In revising, you teach yourself. You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.

Revising our lives in earnest might mean we walk away from the safe job, leave behind a dream for the future that no longer fits our direction, or uproot beliefs that limit our growth. Sometimes we unmoor from habits, other times we break our own hearts by unlatching from relationships that pull us away from or holding us back from our true selves.

Facing this kind of revision requires us to be resolute, even in our fear. We need a kind of steadfast ferocity to rip apart the comfortable narratives we’ve told ourselves about life paths we once believed in but which no longer serve the version of the life we are building, the only life we can build if we are to become the person we need to be. And the person we need to be is, in some realm beyond our limited understanding, already hovering in wait for us, somewhere out there in future time.

It makes sense to me that life requires brave revision, because living a human life is spectacularly messy. We’re constantly building—and repairing—the ramshackle ship as we sail it. We take on water. We lose engine power. We break the rudder, or we forget to build one in the first place. We were never given any blueprints or even instructions for the so-called ship. Instead we’re born and we’re handed some old boards and a paddle. Just like that, we’re off.

No wonder we sputter!

The very same is true of creative writing. And I specify creative writing, because there are many other kinds of writing that can be done by formula or template or according to a meticulous outline made in advance. And yes, some of those forms of writing do require creativity. But creative writing for its own sake is different. The only way to start any truly creative project is to be willing to make some kind of a mess, and sometimes a big one. After we make the mess can we come back and shape it. The brilliant Anne Lamott gave us permission for this kind of chaos. She said to begin in darkness. She said we can write “godawful first drafts” and we can “do it afraid.”

This advice, this permission, this mandate, should be so freeing for us, but for some reason, we more often find it terribly uncomfortable to make messes. It’s as if we fear that even in our drafting (that is, writing pages no one else might ever even see!), even when we’re still searching for whatever it is we’re trying to say, searching for the story that’s trying to be told and the best container through which to tell it, we have to write prettily and perfectly. We have to sound like we know how to write. We have to be good at it. This pressure works against us in profound ways. If we constrain ourselves to making work that stays in the narrow lanes of well-behaved verbiage, we will almost certainly write good sentences, but we will also almost certainly never crack open the most exciting work we’re capable of. In order to do that, we have to take risks, and taking risks means making some messes.

There is no other way.

So if there’s one thing we can do to grow as writers and artists, it’s to get more comfortable with messiness, and more confident in our ability to remake those messes into something meaningful (I’m a believer in zero waste writing, so even if the mess cannot be remade into what we originally thought it could be, there is always something to salvage from it, even if only one true sentence).

Believing in the process and power of revision and our own ability to carry it out helps us face, over and over again, the disorienting experience of setting forth with no blueprints, no instructions, and also, I forgot to mention, no map. It’s so much easier to start writing and keep writing if we remind ourselves often that we can always, always, always change our work.

In both writing and life, revising teaches us to become survivors of our own choices. We learn what can be left behind without crumbling. We learn that the self is not static; it is a manuscript we carry throughout our lives, longing to be re-read and reconsidered regularly. We are human beings, I like to say, not human beens.

So let this be an invocation: let’s be willing to write badly. Then let’s begin to allow the blast of revision to rend us open, so we remake ourselves. Let’s embrace the tumult, the pain, the naked beauty of it all. Each cut is a liberation. Each reshaping creates capacity—for beauty, for mystery, for the deep kind of grace that only comes when we learn to reimagine our work and ourselves.

In the end, every page rewritten builds our confidence. Every fear faced becomes a bridge to a stronger version of ourselves. Revision is not a task—it’s a way of life, a way of living. When we dare to cut deep, to churn out messy drafts, then coax them into shape, we cultivate the audacity to reframe failure, redesign our paths, and author our own becoming.

Love,

Jeannine

Postscript

If you have revision stories to tell, please do! The footnoted link is such a great account of how revision leads us to the core of the work.

As for me, I am a relentless reviser. I revised The Part That Burns more times than I can count, and that’s not just a saying. I literally cannot count (in part because my files are so messy!).

I do know that I dramatically reimagined the manuscript from a fragmented memoir to a traditionally structured novel at one point (in response to agent feedback). That giant overhaul meant really, truly altering the entire shape of the book. It meant adding about 30K more words that all came back out for the published version. It meant creating a more traditional narrative arc, which required me to make up a lot of scenes and just generally “see again” the entire story with an openness to both what was not and what might have been.

The novelized version was a finalist in the Autumn House fiction contest, which I’m proud of (having never been a winner but a many time second-place, finalist, honorable mention, etc. etc.). But, it did not take me long to know that the fictionalized version of the stories in The Part That Burns didn’t quite work. It was not the true version, which had little to do with facts. Even in its fictionalized form, the manuscript held the truth as I knew it. It was simply that the fictionalized form did not, how can I say this?—it did not ring out true. It did not echo across all the seas and valleys in a true way. It did not hold the shape of truth, nor the heft of truth, both of which we know when we feel them.

And that—this search for the shape and heft of truth—is the major work of revision. Revising teaches us to see again, yes, but it also teaches us to listen and to feel. It teaches us to perceive—to perceive ourselves and the world in a more vivid, particular, and precise way.

What greater gift could we ask for?

1. https://brevity.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/revelation/