Revision is Really Writing

Getting a first draft finished feels good. Perhaps it is disheartening, then, to realize that a first draft is only the tiniest of first steps towards a finished essay. As a writer, I really love the revision process--I'm one of those writers who finds it hard to let go of a piece of writing (blogging is good practice in letting things go before they feel really finished; if you want to read a post about my process, click here). Tinkering with my ideas, moving sections around, developing the relationships between sections, and, finally, editing for clarity and precise language--this is what I love about writing. 

I'm not going to try to convince you to love revision. But I AM going to try to convince you take the process seriously. Here is what a few of the pros say (with thanks to John Trimble for the first two and the last):

From Nora Ephron, Revision and Life, “ in The New York Times, reprinted in The Writer magazine, April 1987.

In my 30’s, I began to write essays, one a month for Esquire magazine, and I am not exaggerating when I say that in the course of writing a short essay--1,500 words, that’s only six double-spaced typewritten pages--I often used 300 or 400 pieces of typing paper, so often did I type and retype and catapult and recatapult myself . . .*

 From an interview with Ernest Hemingway in the Paris Review:

Interviewer:  How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway:  It depends.  I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer:  Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway:  Getting the words right. *

From Anne Lamott:

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

This is from Bird by Bird. You can read an excerpt of this here.

And then there's editing. This is Oscar Wilde:

All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma; in the afternoon I put it back in.*

I love the way Wilde's comment underscores the stylistic choice one might make about the comma (sometimes; sometimes rules must be followed). As facetious as Wilde perhaps is, this little quip also indicates how seriously a writer should consider every single choice, large or small. Re-seeing those initial choices is what revision is all about.

*Quoted in John Trimble, Writing with Style (Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall, 2000, 1975), 6, 99.