The Importance of "Teeth" in the Art of Revision
Essay in 12 Steps | TWELVE | "There is something wonderful in watching a figure emerge...that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground." ~George Saunders
First Seasonal Live Salon: Sunday October 29
Everyone in this beautiful community is invited to join the us on October 29 for our first-ever Seasonal Live Salon!
What: This first seasonal salon will be open to everyone so please please join us! (Future salons are for paid founding subscribers, but for this first one, we want everyone to have a chance to see what we’re up to with this community-building thing we’re doing!).
How: We’ll have about 40 minutes open mic time for essayists to share snippets of their work as flash readings, followed by 20 minutes of lively craft Q & A. Note, this is not a “workshop,” it’s a celebratory reading! But the Q &A will offer writers a chance for some direct feedback/response to their questions/challenges.
When: October 29th at 12 PM Central
Where: Zoom (meeting invite to be sent one hour prior to event start time)
Special Note to Our Beloved Essay Challenge-ists: Please consider signing up to read your work, even if it’s unfinished and/or you’re nervous to share! We will have room for 10-12 readers and spots will be filled on a first-come first-serve basis. This is a great opportunity to challenge yourself in a fun and very safe way, to push through that last 5% to “finished,” and to communally celebrate all we’ve learned and accomplished. I’ll be in touch within the week with more info on how to sign up to read.
First things first: thank you. This 12-week essay challenge has exceeded my wildest imaginings of what it could be. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate post soon, but for now, I bow to you in deepest gratitude.
Meanwhile, this week’s post is a tactical deep-dive into the art of revision—not just why it matters, but concretely how to do it (better). If you’re ready to jump right in—yay! Or, if you want to revisit (or missed) Step 11 you might review How to Finally Finish A Thing and the accompanying Voice Memo on the grief of letting go.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, I want, here on this momentous occasion of the twelfth and last week of our epic lyric essay challenge, to tell you a personal story about revision.
It happened during one of the final rounds of finishing final edits on my memoir. Billie and I were on my couch shoulder to shoulder, and they were reading over my most recent edits and giving feedback while I worked to clean things up in later chapters.
“Yes!!” they exclaimed suddenly.“Yes, yes, yes, Mom! The teeth! So good.”
I knew exactly the revision they were responding to. It was a scene in which the narrator has to wrestle with the painful, impassable gulf between the life she was born into versus the life her preschool sister was living. It was a scene I had tried and failed to write many times before through reflection/explanation before ultimately finding my way in through a highly specific exterior detail.
This scene takes place soon after the narrator discloses her stepfather’s sexual abuse to her mother, who tells her father (with whom she is currently living, albeit briefly). The narrator has already felt a palpable shift of atmosphere in a household where she was already unwanted and is now even more ostracized, especially by her stepmother, Debbie.
Here, she begins by reflecting on her younger half-sister, Janie:
Luckily, Janie still likes me. She is almost five already, and I am trying to teach her to read, like Jason. She’s not catching on, though. I don’t know why. I feel a secret spark of joy that Janie might be stupid. Then again, I know these kids are way too lucky for that.
Anyway, it’s May now, school is almost over, and my social studies country report is due. I am on my bed trying to draw a map of Spain when Janie appears at the top of my basement stairs in her pink leotard.
“Hi, Janie,” I say. The thing about Spain is that it has
a very irregular shape, with a million little indents. It’s very difficult
to get it right.
When I look up from my map again, Janie is still standing
at the top of my stairs, watching me. Debbie must have washed
Janie’s hair today, because it is so full of static that it forms a kind
of blonde halo around her head. Sometimes I fix Janie’s hair before
ballet.
“Watcha doing?” I say.
She twists her legs around each other, raises her arms above her
head in a circle. “Fifth position,” she says.
“Nice,” I say. “Want me to curl your hair before you go?”
“Mommy says I can’t,” she says.
“Can’t get your hair curled?”
“Can’t go in your room.”
Janie chatters on, her smooth little face tilted sideways. But
I can’t hear what she is saying, because of the rushing in my ears.
It’s extremely loud, even though the air outside my body is still.
Nothing moves except for Janie’s round mouth, opening and closing,
with her tiny teeth, so square and so white, more perfect than
I will ever be.
After this moment with Billie—when they exclaimed over a bit that I already recognized as powerful—we adopted the phrase “looking for teeth” as short hand for the work of this final phase of revision. This idea of seeking out opportunities in the work to look very closely at what is happening and draw it out in the most illuminated, memorable way simply by using hardworking, plain language to create images that resound.
This is similar to what George Saunders talks about here, when he says (in an essay in The Guardian, “What Writers Really Do When They Write”): “As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular.” In this light, the task of a writer doing revision work is to help every word, and every description become the most specific and true version of itself it can be.
Take this example, again from Saunders:
When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.
But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to “grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice”. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to “me, on a different day.”
How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity. I turned my attention to Bob and, under the pressure of trying not to suck, my prose moved in the direction of specificity, and in the process my gaze became more loving toward him (ie, more gentle, nuanced, complex), and you, dear reader, witnessing my gaze become more loving, might have found your own gaze becoming slightly more loving, and together (the two of us, assisted by that imaginary grouch) reminded ourselves that it is possible for one’s gaze to become more loving.
I can’t think of a better time to be reminded that it is possible for our gaze to become more loving.
Back to our task at hand: finalizing our essay projects, whatever they have become. Last week, in Step 11, you narrowed the scope of what you were trying to make. You wrote it down and began to whittle away what you already have to shape it into something that doesn’t quite exist yet.
Now that you have narrowed that scope and pushed the shape of this thing you are making (somewhat) into existence it is time to sharpen your focus. Revision is the phase of the process where the trueness of the thing actually emerges. I understand this sounds vague and possibly frustrating or unhelpful—but I promise you almost every writer ever (or at least the ones I love most) have tried to describe this exact thing in very similar words.
For example, John Mcphee wrote the following about revision in his essay “Draft No. 4” in The New Yorker:
The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.
At this point, you have something that exists, and you’ve agreed with yourself on the limitations of what it can become at this time (what becomes of it later is still a wide open field of possibility!). But for now, during this final phase, you need to pick up the thing up and feel the weight of it.
Run your fingertips over every word.
Read it out loud and feel for the hard edges.
Roll the words around in your mouth.
Let the words melt under your tongue.
Also, give yourself some highly specific lenses through which to view and assess your work now, as well as some concrete tasks toward improving it.
How shall you do that?
First, I’d be remiss not to mention three posts from the archives that may be useful this week: first, an outline of the methods we use in my Writing in the Dark workshop when talking about works-in-progress; second, a very specific process for drilling down into the question of your work’s core “aboutness”; and third, and my very mildly viral “eleven things” post:
https://writinginthedark.substack.com/p/how-to-actually-become-a-better-writer
https://writinginthedark.substack.com/p/an-exacting-tool-for-finding-your
https://writinginthedark.substack.com/p/correction-free-post-of-11-urgent
Ultimately, though, I think the most valuable resource at this particular moment is a compilation of the collected craft wisdom accrued over almost four years of the Writing in the Dark workshop. Writers in the workshop started helping me build this list during a specially themed section of the workshop back in 2021 geared especially toward revision. From there, we’ve added to the list over time.
So, the notes below are like an artifact of live-on-Zoom WITD sessions since 2020. I’ve edited this list of considerations, reminders, techniques, etc., in order to make it understandable, hopefully, to pretty much anyone, not just previous workshop participants. However, this is a great time to ask for clarification on absolutely anything that’s come up during the challenge, including anything on this list, which has been built iteratively with love and care. Oh, and if you have a suggestion to expand this list, please share that as well!