Logic & The Unconscious - Revision Part 2

Continuing my lecture on revision tactics that look to explore a text as a map or a maze by utilizing more playful and experiment-minded approaches for expansion and reshaping

This lecture is continued from Revision Part 1.

Other earlier posts in this series: Generation Part 1, Part 2.

EXPANSE

So you go through the document, you look for places to refine their language; you look for places to expand, where an aside or small passing thought portends a whole other subscene, a clip of backstory, a fold of ambience, something that in describing further can make the text open up. You look for places that don’t seem to get anywhere, and seem instead to be trying to hard, or illuminating something that doesn’t end up having any value despite seeming like great writing at the time (though sometimes just a passage of great writing without application can be the greatest thing; be honest with yourself; what do this do?).

Don’t be afraid to try cutting things, moving things around. One of my favorite ways to give meaning to a section that doesn’t seem to be getting where I want is to find a different place in the body of the text for it, one where it feels more surprising, and at the same time more exactly in the right place. You won’t necessarily have written the text in the right order, and some writing you wrote just to figure out what you really needed to say. Cutting a big section of text that is doing nothing more than trying to explain itself, or explain what the text is doing most directly, can be the most valuable move in the game; you wrote it, so it is in there, though allowing it to survive only as a ghost trace, in the logic of its surroundings, is worth more than nailing the thing on the head itself.