Logic & The Unconscious - Revision Part 1

Some practical thoughts on approaches and mind states used in revision toward unlocking hidden potential in the language and energy of a rough draft

This post is a continuance of my previous lecture on Generation, found here: part one, part two.

I hope you all enjoyed thinking about the approaches and frameworks we discussed previously, and that you found some moments of surprise, explosion in the exercises, and the time surrounding. This week we’re going to look at my personal favorite part of writing: editing, which I think of more as sculpting, decoding and encoding, modeling, mapping, rearranging, and most important, writing like a reader.

Some people might think it sounds insane to say I enjoy editing fiction more than drafting itself, but to me a majority the most fun and valuable moments I’ve had as a writer, not to mention the most rewarding modes of work, come out in returning to the same lines again and again, finding out newly over and over how they work, and how I can tune them to work better, to get to something deeper, that an original draft just passes by. I encourage you, rather than thinking of it as hard labor, eye-bleeding brain-staring, to approach revision as a designer, a compiler, a programmer, an architect, using text and what it attempts to encapsulate as a place where you are truly given full free reign; like being allowed to open up a moment of time and make it anything you want to. In editing, every word in every line becomes significant, can change its entire environment, and perhaps the world in which it stands.

LINE BY LINE

Each time I do a new draft of a text, I save the prior draft as its own file, and make a new file for the new version. I can’t tell you the number of times that this has saved my mind, as part of the art of editing is trying things out to see what they do, and sometimes those things don’t work. Often pieces or paragraphs or fragments from a text you find yourself wanting to delete in a certain readthrough will suddenly be sorely missed further down the road; or a place where they might fit better, more surprisingly, might appear, and you will so glad you saved what you had. Also, sometimes only time can show what you’ve done right in how it feels, and so when you are making edits you might come back to realize you’ve beaten it to death, gone past the point of what that original vibe you harnessed in the first draft was doing. It’s a weird little chemistry, and having all the antidotes still at your fingertips will be a relief, even if you never use them.