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
Lit Salon offers 9 Questions and 26 Craft Keys for revising our writing to be stronger, clearer & more alive
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. ❤️