A Valuable Lesson About Revision

photo by Rami / Flickr
photo by Rami / Flickr

These last few months, I have been busily working on material for Scratch, a digital magazine I’m launching this fall with Manjula Martin. (I’ll be ready to tell you more in a couple weeks.)

I have spent more time rewriting my work than writing it, which I expected. Or, I believe the old adage is true: “Writing is rewriting.”

In his essay for Glimmer Train, Phil Tate discusses a valuable lesson of rewriting, or revision:

Willful expansion adds stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is not, and forcing myself to cut deeply—not only when it was good enough but when it was good—made a stronger, more tightly focused story.

Read Tate’s full essay here. (And stay tuned to Scratch here.)

Other pieces from Glimmer Train this month:

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Barbara McDowell Whitt

Jane, I am eager to learn more about Scratch. Among my memorable moments was when a Kansas City Star editor phoned me about an article I had submitted for publication and told me, “Let me start by saying you write very well.” He went on to say he had learned in journalism school that “…what you leave out is as important as what you leave in.”

I am glad to have lived long enough to experience the age of the Internet. Since my blog, A 1961-1965 Park College Diary is, at this time, merely a transcription of the diary entries I wrote then, I get my writing practice by leaving comments on other people’s blogs.

I love the way words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs can be shortened, moved around, expanded or deleted.on the screen in front of me. Having experienced manuscript submitting in the age of onion skin second copies, carbon paper, typewriter erasers and eventually correction fluid, I recall many instances when I let a less than desirable word, phrase, sentence or paragraph stay since it was too much trouble to change it.

I also appreciate the way “my” cursor serves as a proofreading tool.

Jane Friedman

All I can say is that I feel lucky to have come of age when word processing was part of every school and office!

Kendley

Kenzaburoi Oe wrote a pretty famous essay titled “Keshigomu de kaku” — writing with an eraser. 🙂

siftingtothetruth

While revision is important, I just want to note that not everyone agrees that cutting is the heart of revision. Fitzgerald famously said that writers were either putter-inners or taker-outers, and while he clearly favored the latter, not everyone did. Among others, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Melville were all likely putter-inners. Not bad company.

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