Category: Revisions

The End and What Happens Next

6/24/2017

So—I finally finished the first draft of the sequel to Professed. Now what?

Well, revision, obviously. Which I will document on Twitter and Instagram.

Then—my plans will be a little different. As of now, I think I am going to serialize the novel on a website throughout 2018—fifty installments, beginning (tentatively) January 6th. Then, when the serialization is over, I’ll pull the website down and publish the book as a paperback and Kindle. I’m inspired here by the example of Tom Wolfe, who serialized Bonfire of the Vanities in Rolling Stone in 27 installments beginning in July 1984. A difference here is that Wolfe actually wrote the novel as it was being serialized—incredible pressure on a writer who’s seen as stonecutter-slow. (Another difference is that, uh, obviously—I’m not Tom Wolfe). So I will have the advantage of presenting a work that will be in pretty good shape—though I’m also seeing the serialization itself as a form of revision and extended workshopping.

Now the fun begins….

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Revelation and Realization

2/10/2015

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A traditional model of writing usually proposes that there are two modes of writing: drafting and revising. I more or less reluctantly stand with the traditionalists here, though in my teaching I tend to see them not as separate elements—and certainly not as separate right/left functions of the brain—but as marks on a broad continuum of creativity, marks that are sometimes quite close together and are always connected through the text on the screen or page and through the mind of the writer. The unity of this connection ultimately (and ideally) leads to the successful completion of a text, word by crossed-out word, deleted sentence and replaced sentence, paragraph, page.

When I was first teaching, I referred to these two states as “Discovery and Exploitation.” But about halfway through my second semester teaching Intro to Creative Writing, I began to have doubts about my terminology. I started imagining shiploads of “discovering” conquistadors coming ashore in Mexico and wiping out the indigenous people. Or toxic open-pit copper mines in Montana. Not something I wanted to associate with writing. Also, “discovery,” whether it’s the discovery of gravity or a star or a bacteria, is most times the identification of something that already exists. And the stories that my students were writing then—that you’re writing now, that I’m writing—are something new, unless we’re a pack of shameful plagiarists.

So I now refer to these phases of the creative process as Revelation and Realization.

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What is to Come!

2/7/2015

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What is to come--!!

In the syllabus I give to beginning writers at the start of a semester, I usually have some version of the following statement:

I really do expect the work in your portfolio to be revised. Please understand that revision does not mean merely correcting a few grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors (though that of course is important). Revision means re-envisioning your work—re-imagining it, re-creating it, transforming it into something better than what you started with.

It seems that most students really do often assume that revision consists mainly of copy-editing, of correcting the pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that plague almost every manuscript. They are wrong, of course, and sometimes resistant to the rather vague terms re-envisioning or re-imagining or re-creating, and have to be pushed—pushed somewhat gently for the beginners and with a bit more urgency for advanced students—toward taking up the necessary challenge of making their writing better and facing the sad fact that their writing, fresh from their nimble minds, just isn’t good enough as it is.

In a letter to a friend, Leo Tolstoy said, "...What I published previously I consider only a test of the pen and ink. What I am printing now I like better than the earlier things, but it seems weak, needed as an introduction. But what is coming!"

That pile of paper you printed off and I hope you’re gazing so fondly at is merely—adequate. It’s mediocre. Even though it’s a work of genius, it’s just average. The “what is coming!” is the work that you will create through revision, the new work—the new novel, the new story—the true work of genius as it ought to be. The problem then facing the writer—facing you and all writers—is getting the text to the point where it’s good and brilliant enough to abandon, to quit, to say it is finished and ready for publication, a process that takes place in the brain as much as it does on the page.

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Ordinary Horrors

The End and What Happens Next

Revelation and Realization

What is to Come!

Lowell Mick White

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