The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Revision

Friday, February 6, 2009

Revision

I can't write five words but that I change seven. - Dorothy Parker

The problem with revision is that it never seems hopeful to me; it just makes me feel like I failed the first time around. And I can't really complain successfully (meaning I get sympathy) to anyone unless that person writes. Then I can get lots of sympathy.

Actually, I almost never talk about writing, particularly my writing, to anyone I see on a day-to-day basis because where we live (a small seaport village that mostly supported McCain/Palin and doesn't miss a televised football game) no one:

a) believes that writers live anywhere near here

or

b) believes that I am one no matter what I say -

since the "real" ones don't live so close to the Chumbucket Bait Shop.

So I can only complain here. I tried complaining to my boys and they put their Ipods in and motioned that they couldn't hear me. My husband shrugged and said, "Just get it done." When I tried to complain to my daughter, she said, "Is it the middle grade story with the girl in it?" When I told her it wasn't, she walked out of the room. (Maybe flounced is a better word there).

What's so awful about revision? Well, look at the word a minute. It's a re vision which means you have to go back to a story you have mentally finished envisioning and face all the holes and gaps and weirdness that you ignored or didn't notice the first time around. I don't want to face them; I just want them to go away or fix themselves.

I have a friend who writes all the time, but she is still unpublished. She has such a better attitude than I do that she deserves to be published way more than I do. She's never surly about anything. In fact, she always tells me how she feels this wild sense of hope when she sits down to revise (see opening sentence) and I say encouraging things to her like, "What is wrong with you?" She sees revision as an opportunity to make her writing really shine, to learn from her mistakes, to pull everything together.

I know she's right, only I know it on an intellectual level, not on an emotional one. I feel extraordinarily put upon when I have to revise. I love to WRITE novels, not tinker. And what is this obsession editors have with logic and chronology issues anyway?

I get even crabbier when people (the ones I live with who are starting to get hungry and wonder when I am going to start dinner) say, "How's the editing going?" Editing is easy; revision should never be confused with editing. Editing is fixing grammar, spelling, tweaking a few sentences; revision is going into the structure and reorganizing the walls. It's work and writing is fun.

I can't imagine going through the revision process with other people. My friend (see above paragraph) belongs to a writers' group and she revises publicly - meaning, they sit around a Starbucks and tell her where her work needs to change. And she likes this, she drives there on cold nights to listen to their thoughts on revision.

That amazes me. I find it much better to hunker down, feel really sorry for myself, put a stack of chocolate next to my desk, and talk about how awful revision is because as long as I'm doing that, I can keep avoiding it.

8 comments:

Adrienne said...: I'm starting to think that behind every creative endeavor there is a stash of chocolate.
(Best of luck on your revisions); Friday, 06 February, 2009
Marcia said...: Oh dear. You may not like me here. I love revision. I find it easier to work with something that already exists. It's the first draft that drives me crazy.

But I really enjoyed your post, if that helps! :); Friday, 06 February, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Yes, Adrienne, I am sure chocolate stimulates the part of the brain that makes us happy so we write better. It's one of those ideas that can't be proved scientifically, but I just know it's true on the spiritual plane.

And Marcia, I love that you find the first draft harder. I am constantly telling my students that there is no ONE way to write, and each of us has to find our way, all that stuff. So I am actually going to use this example on Wednesday when I teach my writing class (it's perfect); Friday, 06 February, 2009
Stephanie J. Blake said...: You already know my secret revision weapons. Dark Chocolate Chex Mix and red vines. I ifnd all of it really hard. It's like I need a direct pipeline from my what my brain to the computer.; Saturday, 07 February, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: I'm revising too, and I feel just like you do about it: it's like having teeth pulled, in the cold, without anesthesia. It's hellish and soul destroying, and my problem with it is that the story could go so many ways and I'm not sure which way is best. I know the beginning and end; I know much of the middle. But all the bits and pieces that connect those middle bits with the beginning and ending -- they are the ones that plague me.

My husband is a good beta reader, so I'm lucky. But he gets bees in his bonnet very quickly and just discussing WIPs with him can be a minefield. And I'll never tell another neighbor or colleague that I write. "Oh, you're so lucky! Hurry up and publish so you don't have to do real work anymore!"

Sigh.; Sunday, 08 February, 2009
Katie Anderson said...: so funny! I am actually doing my first "requested revisions." Or at least I kinda am. My dream agent "passed" ("at this time") on my novel but gave me several ways she thought I should "tighten it."

(I am not sure if I am tightening it for her to see again though? Haven't had that conversation yet.)

Anyway, I LOVED revising when my critique group suggested it, but now that it feels necessary I am DYIING!

It's so hard. My eyes feel like they are going to burst. And I am certain that I am creating new wrinkles around my eyes and forehead and nose...

BUT, hopefully she is right and the "revised" story will be sellable :-)

Good Luck!; Thursday, 12 February, 2009
Nora MacFarlane said...: Writing the first draft is like having a baby, hellish, painful, and wonderful - all at the same time. I find revising much easier.

Good luck to you on your revisions!; Thursday, 12 February, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: I enjoy revising to a certain extent, because I like playing with language. But there's this letdown when you realize that the chapter that felt so fabulous when you first wrote it, the one that flowed so well that it was certainly inspired by some divine creature blowing in your ear, is really a bunch of dog doo. So I completely know what you mean. :); Friday, 13 February, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***