My favorite technique is applicable to both generation and revision. It's the principle of writing out of order.
What, prithee, do I mean by this? First of all, most of the time, the only thing getting in the way of you writing anything and nothing has to do with the editor inside you revising away while you're just trying to get things out. The inner editor loves to use order (e.g. start with the introduction only!) as an excuse: don't listen. Write what you are most excited to write first and write it all into a heap. Start wherever you want. Organize it later.
Revising "out of order" is the process of putting your current work *out* of order. This does a couple of things: if you wrote a poem, read it line by line, backwards, and see if it still makes sense. Even better, scramble the order of lines or parts entirely and read them that way. If you've been working on a piece for a while, especially a poem, I like to look away from the draft entirely and try to write the whole thing from memory a month or so later. Whatever you don't remember probably doesn't matter. Whatever you do probably matters a great deal to you.
You'll find new combinations of what works, first of all, but you'll also learn about what is essential to the beginning, the middle, and the end of what you're making. Most of all, the best revision process will help you discover your intention.
I definitely need some kind of defamiliarisation: something that forces me to experience my writing afresh, as a reader would. Lately that's been reformatting it and sending it to an e-reader on my phone, so I can read it on the go and work out where it is/isn't possible to follow the thread of a particular thought, especially if you're only half paying attention.
I've had something of a sea-change in my attitude to revision in the last few years: I'm determined to strip away as much unnecessary connective tissue as possible to leave more space for a reader's imagination. I used to labour over scenes to try and give as much clarity as possible; now I intentionally try to leave space for the reader's interpretation, giving just enough detail to enable the co-creation of meaning.
Often that means my revision is quite brutal, and the first revision leaves only a skeleton text - but at least that gives you something stable to both strengthen and build upon.
Hi Tom! The "skeletal text" sounds like an impactful way of getting directly to the heart of what you're trying to convey in your writing. Co-creation is also a huge part of what I try to invite in my own work, particularly with the use of silence and blank space. I do find that some people want the "whole" story, but I find that literary works should be like other people, even the ones most intimate to us: willing to share but ultimately mysterious and independent.
Absolutely that, and I love your description. I don't know whether this is distinctive to literary works, or whether it's the case for different media too. The act of hermeneutics is so personal that it feels as though every reader will bring something distinctive to the table. I'm sure I once read Toby Litt say that literature should embrace that as a strength, lean into it, rather than trying to emulate cinema.
Thanks so much for sharing this technique, Yanyi. Especially how inner editor interferes with what you're excited about. Recently I listened to a talk where Jericho Brown described how he cut up lines he had written and just moved them around on a table until he could figure out how they should go (I'm paraphrasing here from the Krista Tippett interview) and it seemed to be marvelous act of play. I did it with my stagnant, messy memoir draft: printed the numbered sections out in the smallest versions my printer would allow and plopped on the floor to sort them out. It works! My back was killing me after hours doing it but I haven't felt so excited about my progress since I started it in 2016. A writing instructor once recommended storyboarding, but I dismissed it thinking it wasn't for me and I didn't really know how to storyboard on a document in Word. Outlines didn't do it for me either, I needed to see chunks of the writing at once and I needed a sense of play to prevent my inner editor from trying to revise lines. Reading your words today really validated this kind of approach.
Hi Rascher! I'm delighted to hear that this has helped you today. Yes, there's a strange temptation for me, at all times, to start from the beginning! I'm actually still working on this habit with how I write the Sunday letters—can't help but start from the top. But the one time I did a quick speed-draft, I both got all the drivel out of the way *and* discovered what I was trying to say much quicker. Anyway.
I've underestimated how important the physical aspect of organizing is to my mind. Never again. Printing out all the poems for my last book and then ordering them by picking them out from a pile—it was a complete thrill. The other popular technique is to get on the floor, as you have. I find that this works well if you are not putting together a single thread of thought. Rather, it can kind of look like writing the score for a symphony. Exhilarating!
Yessss! I hit a total wall with my novel draft this week and, in despair, printed a bunch of it out to try to work with it that way. I've been literally cutting the pages up and taping them back together, and it feels incredibly powerful.
Love this question! My favorite process for more radical changes (when I really need to shake it up and find new life to a piece) is to highlight only the lines/words/phrases that I knoww I want in the piece. Anything I don't absolutely love is gone, and then I basically just rewrite the whole thing using the parts that I saved and maybe I love the new piece more, maybe I combine them with parts from the old one, maybe it's still not close to a final form, but it definitely gets my brain working in different ways about that poem. (I think I learned this in a class I had with Joseph Legaspi).
For smaller edits (when I just need some new words here or there to spice things up), I have two techniques I've been into.
The first I got from a class I had with Catherine Barnett, and if ever there was an adjective (or other type of word) that we needed, she would literally pull out a random book and just ask us to search for a word to replace it with. She always recommended not using any book that's poetic already, but maybe a non-fiction piece (she even gave us some copies of pages from old 1960s era magazine ads for cleaning supplies). That way it helps provide more interesting language that I probably hadn't considered before.
The other is one that I just started doing a few months ago. I'll translate the whole piece into a different language and then back again. Because different languages refer to things differently, it can help just rearrange some things, and give me slightly altered wording in places. I would only recommend this though if you're looking for very minor adjustments.
I hope that some of these are new for other people, and thank you everyone for sharing! Always looking for new ways to edit things! :-)
My favorite technique is applicable to both generation and revision. It's the principle of writing out of order.
What, prithee, do I mean by this? First of all, most of the time, the only thing getting in the way of you writing anything and nothing has to do with the editor inside you revising away while you're just trying to get things out. The inner editor loves to use order (e.g. start with the introduction only!) as an excuse: don't listen. Write what you are most excited to write first and write it all into a heap. Start wherever you want. Organize it later.
Revising "out of order" is the process of putting your current work *out* of order. This does a couple of things: if you wrote a poem, read it line by line, backwards, and see if it still makes sense. Even better, scramble the order of lines or parts entirely and read them that way. If you've been working on a piece for a while, especially a poem, I like to look away from the draft entirely and try to write the whole thing from memory a month or so later. Whatever you don't remember probably doesn't matter. Whatever you do probably matters a great deal to you.
You'll find new combinations of what works, first of all, but you'll also learn about what is essential to the beginning, the middle, and the end of what you're making. Most of all, the best revision process will help you discover your intention.
I definitely need some kind of defamiliarisation: something that forces me to experience my writing afresh, as a reader would. Lately that's been reformatting it and sending it to an e-reader on my phone, so I can read it on the go and work out where it is/isn't possible to follow the thread of a particular thought, especially if you're only half paying attention.
I've had something of a sea-change in my attitude to revision in the last few years: I'm determined to strip away as much unnecessary connective tissue as possible to leave more space for a reader's imagination. I used to labour over scenes to try and give as much clarity as possible; now I intentionally try to leave space for the reader's interpretation, giving just enough detail to enable the co-creation of meaning.
Often that means my revision is quite brutal, and the first revision leaves only a skeleton text - but at least that gives you something stable to both strengthen and build upon.
Hi Tom! The "skeletal text" sounds like an impactful way of getting directly to the heart of what you're trying to convey in your writing. Co-creation is also a huge part of what I try to invite in my own work, particularly with the use of silence and blank space. I do find that some people want the "whole" story, but I find that literary works should be like other people, even the ones most intimate to us: willing to share but ultimately mysterious and independent.
Absolutely that, and I love your description. I don't know whether this is distinctive to literary works, or whether it's the case for different media too. The act of hermeneutics is so personal that it feels as though every reader will bring something distinctive to the table. I'm sure I once read Toby Litt say that literature should embrace that as a strength, lean into it, rather than trying to emulate cinema.
Thanks so much for sharing this technique, Yanyi. Especially how inner editor interferes with what you're excited about. Recently I listened to a talk where Jericho Brown described how he cut up lines he had written and just moved them around on a table until he could figure out how they should go (I'm paraphrasing here from the Krista Tippett interview) and it seemed to be marvelous act of play. I did it with my stagnant, messy memoir draft: printed the numbered sections out in the smallest versions my printer would allow and plopped on the floor to sort them out. It works! My back was killing me after hours doing it but I haven't felt so excited about my progress since I started it in 2016. A writing instructor once recommended storyboarding, but I dismissed it thinking it wasn't for me and I didn't really know how to storyboard on a document in Word. Outlines didn't do it for me either, I needed to see chunks of the writing at once and I needed a sense of play to prevent my inner editor from trying to revise lines. Reading your words today really validated this kind of approach.
Hi Rascher! I'm delighted to hear that this has helped you today. Yes, there's a strange temptation for me, at all times, to start from the beginning! I'm actually still working on this habit with how I write the Sunday letters—can't help but start from the top. But the one time I did a quick speed-draft, I both got all the drivel out of the way *and* discovered what I was trying to say much quicker. Anyway.
I've underestimated how important the physical aspect of organizing is to my mind. Never again. Printing out all the poems for my last book and then ordering them by picking them out from a pile—it was a complete thrill. The other popular technique is to get on the floor, as you have. I find that this works well if you are not putting together a single thread of thought. Rather, it can kind of look like writing the score for a symphony. Exhilarating!
Yessss! I hit a total wall with my novel draft this week and, in despair, printed a bunch of it out to try to work with it that way. I've been literally cutting the pages up and taping them back together, and it feels incredibly powerful.
I just think about how Nabokov wrote drafts on notecards. It's this whole technique, handwritten!
Love this question! My favorite process for more radical changes (when I really need to shake it up and find new life to a piece) is to highlight only the lines/words/phrases that I knoww I want in the piece. Anything I don't absolutely love is gone, and then I basically just rewrite the whole thing using the parts that I saved and maybe I love the new piece more, maybe I combine them with parts from the old one, maybe it's still not close to a final form, but it definitely gets my brain working in different ways about that poem. (I think I learned this in a class I had with Joseph Legaspi).
For smaller edits (when I just need some new words here or there to spice things up), I have two techniques I've been into.
The first I got from a class I had with Catherine Barnett, and if ever there was an adjective (or other type of word) that we needed, she would literally pull out a random book and just ask us to search for a word to replace it with. She always recommended not using any book that's poetic already, but maybe a non-fiction piece (she even gave us some copies of pages from old 1960s era magazine ads for cleaning supplies). That way it helps provide more interesting language that I probably hadn't considered before.
The other is one that I just started doing a few months ago. I'll translate the whole piece into a different language and then back again. Because different languages refer to things differently, it can help just rearrange some things, and give me slightly altered wording in places. I would only recommend this though if you're looking for very minor adjustments.
I hope that some of these are new for other people, and thank you everyone for sharing! Always looking for new ways to edit things! :-)