Revise and Wait
Writing is like shoveling snow—all the details you want to write about accumulate so rapidly that you can’t get them all down. You’re not sure that they will come to you tomorrow, and you’re not yet confident that you will have plenty of other things to write about if your memory fails.
Revising, on the other hand, is like carding wool or like combing out long strands of hair—raking out the tangles, the cockleburs and dirt, and leaving the long strands clean and smooth and straight so that a comb can pass through the long, smooth hair unencumbered.
Before you send a poem, story, essay, or chapter out in public, you will want to make sure its shirt is tucked in.
It’s a rare first draft that can be published or even read in public. Almost every piece of writing needs some rewriting, rethinking, and polishing before it is ready to take center stage.
The first step in spotting the flaws in what you have written is a simple one. Set it aside and let it cool off for a while, the longer the better. Take a look at it after twenty-four hours if you must, tinker with it a little, then set it aside again for as long as you can stand to. As if you had put it in a petri dish, the longer you leave a piece of writing by itself the more spores of trouble will surface. If you can bear to do it, leave it alone till it begins to look as if somebody else might have written it. (Stephen King sets the first draft of his books aside for six weeks before writing the second draft.) Then you can see it for what it is, a creation independent of you. Writing has to be equipped to thrive on its own in a largely indifferent world. You can’t be there with it, like its parent, offering explanations, saying to an unappreciative reader, “Yes, but here’s what I meant …”
Just what should you expect to see when you look at your writing after it has rested for a time? All sorts of things: peculiar syntax, tortured grammar, illogical thinking, misspellings, wordiness, silliness, preciousness. You may discover that the sweet sounds and rhythms you heard in your head when you wrote it now sound lumpy and awkward. (If you want to, you can ask for a little help here. Have a friend read your piece aloud to you, without studying it first, then listen carefully to the way in which he or she accents the words and places emphasis. A piece that sounded beautifully smooth to you when you heard it in your head may sound like a pretty rough road when you hear it read aloud.)
Even when you are very pleased with what you have written, you can make it even better or larger or more inspired or smarter, as the writer Susan Sontag observes. In revising, Sontag says, “You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind.”
And what’s the big hurry, anyway? When you’re baking cinnamon rolls, you don’t take the bowl of raw dough to your friends and ask them if they like it. You wait till the rolls have been baked and have cooled and you’ve put on a little icing. The truth is, nobody’s waiting for you to press your writing into their hands. Nobody’s hungry for it. It’s likely that not a living soul has big expectations for the success of it other than you. Of course, you want your writing to be wonderful—a work of pure genius, beautiful, heartbreaking, memorable—and that’s just the kind of writing your audience would like to read. So let time show you some of the things you can improve before handing it to somebody and being embarrassed by a problem, or two or three problems, that you couldn’t see in the giddiness of having just written something you like.
But keep on writing. Start a new piece while you’re waiting for an earlier one to age. Most of us are tempted to get approval before moving on. We want our mothers to praise our mud pies before we make any more. But if you’re going to get better at writing, you have to write a lot. You have to press on. We all learn writing by writing. Isak Dinesen said, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
Several years ago, a man was telling Ted about his uncle, a horseshoe-pitching champion. One day he asked the uncle how he’d gotten good at horseshoes, and his uncle said, “Son, you got to pitch a hundred shoes a day.” That’s what it takes to get good at writing, too. You’ve got to pitch your hundred shoes a day.
Get with the process: Put your new poem, story, or essay in a file folder of its own and start work on the next one. When you finish a draft, or get stuck, put it in its own folder. After a month or so, you’ll have a stack of folders on the side of your desk and can start looking through them, beginning with the oldest. You’ll be amazed at the way the passage of time has helped you come up with solutions to problems you had during the writing of those early drafts.