The Greatest Teacher: Revision

When I first started writing a novel, I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew how to craft poetry and the structure that came with creating line after line. I knew there was a turn I needed, that the language or the scene I had captured in my head would carry me from Point A to Point B. I had no concept of driving the plot, only that I thought my characters could do it for me. Whatever I ended up writing would go far off the track of what I thought it was supposed to be. I told myself, “That’s alright. Just adapt. Take it in stride.”

So I would write my novel with a withering sense of knowing how it would end. I thought that if I just needed to reach a goal point and I would figure out what would happen from there. The plot was not clear in my mind. Because the plot was not clear, my writing suffered. My characters suffered. I spent hours working on descriptions of places that I could see in my head, but I eventually lost sight of my characters entirely. I spent months working on how to build sentences, to make the words move like liquid in the brain. I let go of the anxiety that not knowing my writing would take me would go. I let go and just... wrote.

My first completed draft was done in the late winter of 2014. I thought I had done it. I had made a story happen. I only let one person see it in its entirety and when he gave his feedback, the primary thing he mentioned was that there were no male characters. At all.

I looked again. I realized he was right. I had built a story entirely on a young girl’s perspective in a house that she only ever left once. There was no real structure to the plot, no expanse of the world around her. I had suffocated my main character with my lack of plot. I had not let her discover or explore the world around her because I had built no architecture she could grow around. I had created a city in the clouds and left my character to rot beneath it, her potential unearned because I had not built the ladders for her climb.

Then, I began to revise. I knew I needed to give her opportunities beyond the confines of her walls, so I created a moment of crisis that she met head on. She surprised me. She took it in stride. She adapted.

So I added another moment of crisis. And another. Then, I turned to my other characters and drove them to their "turn," or their own moments of decision. The world changed. My structure grew. I filled in the blanks, one step at a time.

My view of revision is much different than others I have worked with. I do not see revision as a type of line-editing. I see it as not just homework, but an education. I read lines in my book on the screen and I change the sentences, just so. I take a step back and look at the chapter, seeing how a scene contributes to the chapter and then to the rest of the novel. I look at the characters in the whole movement of the book and, through time and patience, see what changes need to be done to them to transform them into whole beings. Sometimes when this happens, it transforms the entire balance of the plot. A greater rewrite is required. I find myself pulling descriptions from earlier drafts and then transforming them to fit into the new storyline. The passion and fervor of the first draft is still there. The language is consistent because I do not just see puzzle pieces that fall into line, but catch the same shade of emotion or color in a piece and then cut and shape it to fit into the blank space. The balance changes. The mood shifts to match what I need it to be. The story takes shape under my hands.

Revision has, in effect, taught me how to write. Over the process of revision, I have learned that our characters can handle much more than we are often willing to give them. If we need them to have a structure, they will bend. They will adapt. When we write, we are not chiseling Michelangelo's David fully formed out of a single piece of stone. We are molding, crafting, smoothing, patching. Our novels are as flexible as clay and will remain changeable for as long as we are willing to pour our sweat and tears into the dry cracks.

This is what revision is to me.

And, as anyone will tell you, I do not fear getting my hands dirty.