“The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?” George Saunders
At one point in the eighteen-month period during which I revised my memoir, This Is My Body, I tried to quit. I’d tweaked, tooled, and re-imagined many, many sentences. And these were not just any sentences. They were sentences that detailed the most intimate, vulnerable moments of my life. And then I did it again, and again. I clarified, cut, and tweaked. I answered my editor’s excellent questions, “What did you mean by this?” and “Could you say a little more about this here?” I said a little more about it there. To be honest, my book needed this level of attention, and I was lucky to have found an editor willing to give it that. But I had reached the end of something. Maybe myself.
I closed my laptop and put it in a drawer. I took a walk around my neighborhood. I cooked a meal. I met a friend for coffee. At the coffee shop, I talked about my book. My friend was kind. She didn’t leave. While walking, I thought about the problem with the dialogue in chapter 7. While cooking, I gamely asked myself what would happen if I cut chapter 3? I passed the weekend like this and by Monday I was refreshed, and ready to get back to it. My editor and I finished the revisions, the book went to copy edits, then galleys, then…well, that’s for another essay.
I tell you all this because I’ve been asked to share some thoughts on revision and as a teacher of writing, I know most essays need to start with an anecdote, something the reader can connect with. In the first draft of this essay, I started with a definition:
Revision is practice, rehearsal, re-imagination, tuning (as in an instrument or an engine)
Then I thought, nah. I cut that part and moved it. I wrote what is now the opening paragraph of this essay. See what I did there?
Usually, I have borderline obsessive requirements about how I revise. I clean my space just enough so that I’m not distracted by the piles of dog hair and dust bunnies and dirty dishes in the sink, but not so much that I spend my day cleaning. It’s a delicate balance peculiar to me. The most important thing is that the cleaning takes no more than ten minutes. Then I light a candle, preferably one that smells good. I’ve learned that I need a good smell to keep me going hour after hour and it masks the smell of the cat litter box when it needs cleaning. Then I hit start on the electric kettle and get the first of many cups of tea ready.
While writing the essay you are currently reading, I did none of those things. This essay is a week late, and so it will require a more aggressive strategy. I’m revising it while sitting on my couch reading my Creative Nonfiction students’ final portfolios. It’s the end of the semester. I don’t have time to turn my phone to airplane mode, or light that candle. I’m revising as I write. Which means, the next step will be reading this essay aloud. Reading aloud is the single most important revision technique that I have, one that I usually go to when I’ve got one finished draft, but rarely before. When I read aloud, I learn immediately what doesn’t make sense, what word needs to be replaced, and which sentence is a run on.
I don’t write by hand though I know many people swear by it. I write at my dining room table/desk, on my MacBook Air, while sitting on a pillow so my wrists are slightly elevated. Trying to ward off carpal tunnel. Sometimes I get up and bounce around the house, or I pace, or I make another cup of tea. Pacing and tea-making and bouncing are as essential to the writing process as the actual writing. Your unconscious mind gets to work when your body is distracted with other things.
Annie Dillard in The Writing Life suggests it’s important to drink the right amount of caffeine when writing and revising. Too much and you may have an anxiety attack, too little and you’re falling asleep. Too much caffeine can be remedied by eating a lot of carbohydrates, however, if you find you’ve overdone it and need to get back to work but can’t because your heart is racing from the third double latte of the day. Once I’ve struck a beneficial carbohydrate/ caffeine balance I edit, and write, and re-write and edit some more. Then maybe I send off the draft to a writer friend for feedback. Rinse. Repeat.
You may consider switching mediums, from typing to handwriting— or vice versa. If you write by hand, try typing. If you type, try handwriting. I feel about this like I feel about cliff diving—I’m sure it’s a blast! People love it! I’ve never tried it and I never will. I’m a devout typist; I’m not sure I remember how to write by hand. Re-typing is another revision techniques that I bet is just great, (truly, many famous writers swear by it!) But I have never and likely will never attempt it.
Ultimately you must make the process your own. Do what feels good and easy. Be kind to yourself. Quit saying “…if I were a real writer I should….” As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Stop should-ing all over yourself.” If you’ve ever written something and tried to make it better, you are a writer. To be a writer is to be a reviser. A re-writer. Revision is where you and your work— where me and my work— are refined. Writing is revision. So, get the kettle going. *
Cameron Dezen Hammon is the author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession (Lookout Books), the Nonfiction Discovery Prize Winner for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards, among other honors. Her essays have appeared in The Kiss Anthology (W.W. Norton),Vogue, Guernica, Ecotone, and elsewhere; and her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017. She earned her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and teaches creative writing at Rice University, where she is a lecturer. She is at work on a nonfiction book about women and witchcraft.