Revision is when you first get to recognize the distance between what you wanted to write, what you thought you were writing, and what you actually did write. That recognition often makes you want to throw up.
– Carolyn See
Tag: revision
Quotable 312
All I’ve done so far this week is change three characters’ genders and I still don’t know whether their current genitalia are permanent.
– J.K. Rowling
Quotable 82
You can revise crap. You can’t revise nothing. Now get in there and write some crap!
– Saundra Mitchell
Pen to Paper: Revisions
A confession (and, simultaneously, an undignified boast): I was always that kid in school who did a perfect or near-perfect first and only draft of a writing assignment. After years of voracious reading, I knew how sentences should be constructed because I had seen so many of them, and I was a good speller. From handwritten work through my typewriter years, I did one neat, well-crafted version and handed it in.
I despised the occasional assignment which required a messy, marked-up first draft and then the revised, neat, finished paper. I would always write what I needed to and then reverse engineer a rough draft to satisfy my teacher’s pedanticism. Such, then, was the state of my abilities (and my ego).
After getting a word processor, though, and discovering the endless joys of painlessly changing a word to improve a sentence, and of moving entire paragraphs around, I have become an inveterate revisionist reviser editor of my own work.
And that is how the best work is produced. The writer must go back through his story and make certain that every word, every concept is as it should be. Sometimes this will be a simple process; other times, it will mean rewriting the story essentially from scratch.