Re-Vision

Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.

~ Elie Wiesel

Think of rewriting not as drudgery, but as re-vision, of seeing new possibilities in “shitty first drafts,” as Anne Lamott so rightly calls them in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Taking something sloppy and disorganized to a higher level, replete with order, that’s what re-vision does.

How does re-vision work?

You slice and dice the text. Trim the fat. Pare it down like a chef carving a steak or fluting mushrooms.

As painful as it can be, the day comes when beautiful, soul-soothing written passages must be kicked to the curb, when fixing commas and italicizing isn’t enough.

It’s cutting sections away from the manuscript. That’s the meat of real re-vision.

It’s when you as an author must commit a heinous act and “Murder your darlings,” a saying usually attributed to William Faulkner. But those words first came from the lips of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch during a lecture in 1914:

 Style … is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament… If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Think of re-vision as looking at the manuscript in a completely different way than you do with simple editing. It’s akin to seeing how the world changes when you look at it upside down, standing on your head. Or lying in the grass on a warm day, noticing the laciness of a tree’s canopy above you.

Re-visioning and revising is therefore:

• letting the manuscript sit once you reach the end (or what you perceive to be the finish line)—let it rest and let yourself rest.
• reframing the story or essay or chapter when it doesn’t seem to gel or flow—start in the middle, not the beginning—look at it from another angle, consider developmental editing.
• working on that lead, that first sentence, and this could take time, a lot of it.
• checking point of view throughout the manuscript.
• keeping readers reading, so dangle the wriggling worm in front of them and continue yanking it away with enticing words until they’re hooked.
• thinking of culinary metaphors as you glide through your manuscript—“Cut it to the bone,” Stephen King advises, and so does James Baldwin in a 1984 Paris Review interview: “You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”

Remember that any published work, say in The New Yorker, is most likely not what the writer first wrote. It may not even be what they sent to the editor who accepted their pitch.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Art of Writing, written seventy-seven years before Bird by Bird, offers observations on writing just as pithy as Anne Lamott’s.

“Murder your darlings.”

Indeed.

For more on re-vision and revising, check out Roy Peter Clark, Murder Your Darlings and Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser (2020) and William Germano, On Revision: The Only Writing that Counts (2021).

[Editor’s note: WAG would love to see articles on any and all topics of interest to writers. Please send your ideas or finished pieces to Cynthia D. Bertelsen at BlogEditor@writersalliance.org for consideration. Remember: these posts are more than just posts, for they are actual articles and can be cited in your CV/résumé in the same way you would a short story, essay, or any other writing credit you may possess.]