Office Hours

"Have I revised this thing too much or not enough? Or both?"

Q.

Hi George,

Thank you for the wonderful gift that is Story Club.

My question for office hours is this (and please forgive me if I'm going over old ground here):

You've given us an excellent tool for writing - revision. Immediately I saw how this could take the pressure off (when one is confronted with one's shithouse first draft) while also pushing us to heights, writing-wise, that are ordinarily out of reach. To me it's like the Theory of Natural Selection for writing. From simple humble origins - via thousands of small corrections - spectacular exceptionalism, vivid complexity and wild diversity are possible.

My question has to do with overworked writing - whether this is even a risk and, if it is, how to address it. When we revise over and over, do we risk killing freshness or spontaneity or removing interesting jagged edges or poetic redundancies? To use the analogy of painting: On one hand you have oil painting, where you can paint over the top of any mistakes almost as much as you want. On the other hand, you have watercolour painting where you can more or less see every single mark you make in the final painting. Or this is what my watercolourist friend tells me. He says that this is what makes watercolour a difficult medium - it is very easy to overwork and end up with a puddle where the face is supposed to be, for example. I think we think of writing as being closer to oil painting - you really can cut or write over anything you like. But is there any benefit in moving the dial slightly towards the watercolourist approach? To allow some of the early marks to show through? To try to avoid a puddle of over-engineered mess? How do we retain 'freshness' through successive drafts?

Thanks for your consideration!

A.

Well, thank you, for this excellent question.

The simple answer is: yes.  It is definitely possible to over-revise.  I do it all the time.  I might even say I do it (I have to do it) with every story. 

It’s one of the ways I learn what my story is – by stripping it down too far, to its basics and then past that, and ruining it (temporarily, in that draft). 

This is part of what we need to learn about ourselves as revisers, I think.  What does a story of mine look like when I’ve been too strict?  But also:  what does a story of mine look like when I’ve been too lax?

It might be a little like working out.  How do we know when we’ve overdone it?  On the other hand, how do we know when we’ve phoned it in? 

Part of being a good athlete is to have acquired this sort of self-knowledge about the range of our tendencies.

So, when revising, I’d say we want, at least once in our lives, to take things too far: to revise past the point of reason.  This way, we’ll know what happens to our prose when we over-revise it – what it looks like and sounds like. 

And then, of course, we can back out of that version, restore some of the cuts, put the life back into the thing.

Engineers sometimes test a material to failure, as part of the process of really understanding that material.  Likewise (maybe, for some of us) with prose: to really know our prose, we might have to be a little rough with it, see what it’s made of; see what happens if we eschew the idea that composition and editing are delicate processes.  (Again, not true for everyone, but maybe true for some of us and worth a try).

It’s interesting.  Let’s say that you, one day, go too far in your edits.  In addition to seeing what that sounds and feels like, you might ask yourself: “What principle was I honoring as I overdid it?  (In what flavor was I going overboard?)”

When I over-edit, it’s usually because I’ve started doubting the story, or have got good and lost, and then I tend to go all-in on logic (and logic alone).  That is, I forget that prose is magic and I try to reduce it to science.  Another way to say this: I go on Auto-Pilot, and the setting is all about linearity and logic; everything making perfect sense; no waste; all causation.  (No one could fault me, i.e., I’m taking no chances; it all adds up).

You can imagine what a pleasure that stuff is to read.

I remember once, many years ago, when I was writing a long story called “Pastoralia,” I got entirely lost and couldn’t find a way out.  So I produced a strictly logical cut of the story: severe and minimalist and shorn of everything that wasn’t contributing directly to the action of the story. 

What a disaster!  I showed it to my wife, Paula, and she shrugged and said something like, “Well, I see you’ve taken all the fun out of it.”

So, then the job was to put the fun back in.  To recognize that a little mess, a little inefficiency, can be good.  That jokes have a way of earning their place; that the true logic of a story may not be “logical” at all: it’s whatever works, whatever ultimately succeeds in compelling the reader forward, engaging and moving her.

The ways in which a bit of prose can give a story a new lease on life are legion.  We know a bit works because we read it and it works.  We read it again tomorrow – it still works.  For a few days, it feels like it’s not working, so we take it out – and then we miss it, so we put it back in.

In this sense, it’s a war of attrition (whatever lasts, wins).

Anyway, in this spirit, I’ve sometimes given this exercise: take a certain swath of prose of yours that you like tolerably well and cut it by a third.  Then by half (relative to the original length).  Keep cutting until you ruin it.  Then build it back up again. 

When did the fun go out of it?       

When did it become unintelligible?       

Often, there’s a moment where the cuts go so deep that you can’t remember what you originally liked about it. 

There’s no harm in any of this; the original still exists, just as it was before you started cutting.  But you’ll learn something about your method of revising, about what you like and don’t like, about how your prose responds to an extra level of scrutiny. 

This also does a really important bit of work: it reminds us that we are not our prose.  The prose comes from of us, and tells us something about ourselves – but so do the subsequent rearrangements of that text – the cuts, the additions, the juggling around of parts, all of that.  Who’s doing all of that, and by what means?  We’re doing it, and we’re doing it by the application of our taste (the same taste that drove us to write the thing in the first place).

As for your final, and essential, question, “How do we maintain freshness through subsequent drafts?” all I can say, really, is: “Amen!  How DO we?”  By which I mean: yes, that is the question each of us has to deal with.

I’ll just say this: that is one area that, in my experience, has improved with time, and just by time (all of the hours spent writing).  When I was younger, I had to let something sit a week or so before I could see it with fresh eyes.  Now I can (or I think I can) sometimes “refresh” between reads on the same day, and sometimes even for multiple reads on the same day. 

I think that just having that as an intention (“I hope to be able to restore my reading-mind to freshness more quickly”) is part of what eventually makes that happen.

Maybe some of you have developed some tricks regarding this essential skill?