The Art of Revision
Conversations from the Archive
Bread Loaf Lecture Series
November 8, 2021
Peter Ho Davies
The Art of Revision: The Last Word
Nine Revision Tips
Excerpts:
Peter Ho Davies:
Rather than think of our intentions, it may help to think of our original idea of a story as a hypothesis. A draft is an experiment designed to test that hypothesis. One hypothesis: “I think I know the ending.” The ends we have in mind for first drafts are typically climaxes. It usually ends later than we expect—or sooner. An experiment isn’t a failure if it disproves a hypothesis. For a scientist, that’s a success. It means they’ve learned something.
What counts as progress in revision? Don’t measure progress toward a perfection—or even finishing—but toward greater knowledge of your story. If you’ve learned something new about your character, especially if that leads to further revision, you’ve made progress. Most successful revisions prompt further revisions.
One step forward, two steps back. It’s vital to embrace new knowledge because our tendency is to fear it. New knowledge often brings complication. We need to recalibrate our goals, manage our morals, buy ourselves time and patience for revision. Complications should be welcomed as adding depth, texture, and complexity to our work.
Revision is not only editing in the sense of cutting or contraction. There’s time for this kind of revision later in the process. Many second or third drafts need to expand rather than contract. Most of us learn what we know by writing. If you cut too soon, you may not have discovered what you need to know.
Sore thumbs. Workshop is good at identifying problems in the story. We cut those problems. We lop off the sore thumbs—in other words, hammer flat the proud nails. Yet sometimes these odd details, these untidy anomalies, are worth expanding on. The easiest things to cut are the things we wonder, “I’m not even sure why that’s there.” They may be the least planned, most alive things, the places where our subconscious is burrowing into our conscious intent. Following those leads, rather than erasing them, can lead to revisionary discoveries.
Door number one and door number two. Workshop feedback often presents revisionary choices: door number one and door number two. You might be paralyzed by the choices of revisionary responses. That paralysis often results in no choice being made. We fear the wrong choice because it will waste time. We fear making the wrong choice. We make no choice. But what’s the worst that can happen? You make the wrong choice, pursue it, discover it was the wrong choice, and go back to the previous draft. It’s not a wasted endeavor. It’s a successful experiment. The main thing is not to get too hung up on the choice. “Suck it and see,” as we say in England. The choice is hard because we have imperfect information. We can’t see all the ways the choice will play out. The only way to rectify that is to try one path and see where it leads. The only way to choose, in other words, is to choose. And sometimes the only way to choose the right option is to choose the wrong one first.
Boredom. There are writers who will describe this—otherwise known as exhaustion—as the end point of revision. By all means, take a break, but don’t see boredom as necessarily the end. As any child knows, it’s the soil for daydreaming, for imagination. Everyone here is a writer because they were bored. Ask kids in college, at work. Boredom isn’t the end. It’s just a phase of the process before a breakthrough—if we can only wait it out.
Don’t forget to revise titles. They tend to be set in stone very quickly. Shifting the title might be a new nudge for the next revision.
Doneness. Contrary to workshop rules of engagement, we don’t all know what we intend when we set out on a first draft. Not knowing what we intend is not the same as having no intention. Our writing reveals the limits of our original idea, the fuzziness of it—at which point, we’re often tempted to give up. I’d argue on the contrary that we need to persevere. We lose faith in the shining idea that got us started when we discovered its flaws. Our idea is more worthy, not loss, of further explanation. Our discovery our idea isn’t as sharp as we hoped doesn’t mean our idea is no good. This seems to me the exact purpose of revision: not the perfection of expression of some already known subject or idea but the investigation of it toward a deeper understanding. We revise, which is to say, we write to understand our intent, to understand our stories, to understand ourselves. “Love having written” [like Dorothy Parker] means finally understanding what we were doing. That’s how you know you’re done: when you understand why you told your story in the first place.
Peter Ho Davies’ own story of his father and a racist incident when he was a boy took him forty years of revision to find the truth. It’s not a story about bravery or heroism; it’s a story about a level of closeness, not distance, with his father. His father was white and helped another boy in a racist incident because it was the incident he always feared would happen to his son, so he was ready to act. Davies didn’t want to get involved. He was ashamed. The last time he told this story was at his father’s funeral in 2018.
Davies: That’s why we do it. Forty years is worth it, and that’s what revision is.
Q & A: The Marie Kondo strategy of revision: Save the things that bring you joy. So rather than kill our darlings, we kill everything but the darlings. The novelist can also revise as they move forward. Critiques of first chapters can be altered as we press on in many ways. The great struggle of a novel is a bootstrapping issue. We need to tell the story in order to find out what it is, but at the outset we nonetheless need to come up with a hypothesis: “What is the best way to tell my story?” As we get further into the story, our hypothesis about how to tell the story might not be correct. The story has taught us this might not be the best way to tell the story.
Writers (novelists) occasionally change course midcourse. The book decides it’s now part two. Rather than abandoning part one, hit the reset button in a way. Example: Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. It feels like the book reinvented itself—revised itself—at the halfway point. Another example of reinventing itself midcourse: Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. Other writers make shapely art out of those moves, whereas I stumble into mistakes. They wouldn’t do that by design, but it works. They are responding to their material.
Revision is the act of fine-tuning and recalibration. Heavy-handed or too subtle/opaque: Those two things represent the same problem. The sweet spot is recalibration. Most of us are inclined to err on the side of too subtle. Heavy-handed just sounds bad. Too subtle sounds like too much of a good thing. The way you find that sweet spot is not to creep up on it progressively; the way to find it is to undershoot it, and then in a later draft overshoot it. At least now you know it lies between those two spaces.