I love revising. Really. But it’s hard, and harder still to teach. If you don’t believe me, plant yourself among inspired third graders with their freshly penned stories and try to get them to change anything.
You give a nice concise pep talk, including show and tell from your own work. Revision is important! Revision is hard! But you can do it! A child raises her hand. “What if I don’t want to change anything?”
Confident in the power of metaphor, you reach for a few to counter the resistance. It’s like putting on 3-D glasses – when you revise, your story looks different. It’s like your room – it gets a little messy sometimes. But it’s important. You can do it. The same child raises her hand. “What if I like it just the way it is?”
Within us all is a vestigial third grader, happy with our efforts, not so keen on changing anything of substance. Like the third grader, we’re already attached to the structure, the characters, the way the narrative unfolds. Besides, big changes mean big work.
We know we have to go the distance with our projects. We also have to get distance from them. We have to set love and admiration aside (that stunning metaphor! that clever character!) so we can spot flaws and ease them out of our work. We have to silence our inner third graders and take a pragmatic stance. We have to be our own kind and reasonable readers, appreciating what’s done well while questioning everything that’s not.
We approach other books pragmatically, with both kindness and reason. We note what other writers do well, from the sentence level to the whole structure. We note what could have been done better. As writer-readers, we train ourselves to zoom in and out of the prose. But approaching our own work with this stance is tougher that it seems. We want so very much for our writing to be beautiful and whole and perfect.
It’s critical to slow down. When you revise, you must be your own book doctor. First the diagnosis, then the treatment. Start by letting your project cool. When you pick it up to begin revision, find a way to see it in a different physical format. Changing the font and spacing helps. Even better – make it look like a book.
One of the best uses I’ve found for my Kindle is uploading work for a revision read. Not only do I get to see it in a different format, but I also can’t change it as I go. This prevents me from jumping right into treatment, which promotes a narrow view as I zoom in on a particular area and apply my fix. Instead, I’m forced to use the e-reader’s highlighting tool to mark places that need my attention, and to make separate notes about what’s not working, as well as noting the places I want to expand and contract. It’s more cumbersome than fix and go, fix and go - the Jiffy Lube revision. But that’s the point.
Third graders are great fun. But they’re still equipping themselves for life. Getting the distance for tough, meaningful revision is a skill we must make ourselves grow into. Pragmatic, kind, reasonable – that’s the reader you want to be when you revise. And there’s plenty of good in that approach, even beyond the page. “I think back to your class a lot,” a grown-up student recently wrote me. “I feel like I learned some life skills along with editing skills--the ‘pragmatic stance’ that is so enabling; imagining a kind and reasonable reader--what wonderful stuff!”