During my first years of serious writing, I labored under the conceit that I was writing a book. The thought was bracing; it motivated me to climb out of bed at 5:30 so I’d have a half-hour of solitary creativity before I had to face a classroom of seventh graders. Only as I entered my […]
Transformation & Writing Read More »
I grew up a mile from Philipsburg Manor, a restored colonial farm and mill in the Hudson Valley. The summer between seventh and eighth grades, I volunteered there as an apprentice to the weaver. I got to wear a bonnet and bodice, milk the cow, card and spin wool, and I learned to weave. The
Tie-backs and Through-lines: Writing as Weaving Read More »
I’ve just cut fifty pages from a polished, 400-page draft—that’s one-eighth of what I’d considered a completed book. What was in those pages? A few scenes that slowed down the plot, a lot of unnecessary dialogue, whole paragraphs of exposition, and hundreds of extraneous words extracted from too-long sentences. Everything I cut was not my
Removing What’s Not Story Read More »
My daughter, who is almost a year-and-a-half, has discovered the joys of sifting sand. She shovels it into the colander and watches, fascinated, as it streams through, leaving behind the pebbles which she promptly puts in her mouth. After completing a draft, a writer’s task is to construct a new colander, a tool strong enough
Mark Doty, in a class on writing memoir, said that three forces are at play in any personal narrative: the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable. The dynamic between these triune forces is what gives a story life. As I understand it, the spoken force consists of the words on the page—that is, the story
Spoken/Unspoken/Unspeakable Read More »
Whenever I begin to work with a writer on his or her project, I always ask two questions. The first is “Why are you writing this?” The answers I get are often similar—“Because I learned things from my experience I want to share with others”; “Because it’s good therapy”; “Because the world needs to hear
Carol Bly wrote that the essential question we must ask during what she calls “the long middle stage” of writing is, “What more do I have to say about this topic?” Certainly this is a good question to ask early on, when we’ve completed a draft and are unsure where to go next. Usually we’re
Generating in Revision Read More »
The handiest revision tool I know is an empty notebook. Even the presence of that notebook, silent and full of potential in my desk drawer, influences my writing. Why? Because those empty pages, which I’m saving for the purpose of “seeing my subject anew,” exert the same creative potential as the empty pages of my
The Revision Journal Read More »
Lately I’ve been feeling like a revision evangelical. The majority of my teaching time is spent converting beginning and intermediate writers into revisers—that is, into writers who labor beyond their rough drafts into more and more mature versions, taking their creative ideas through the paces of the writing process until they become polished work. Learning
The vast majority of revision work entails either expanding passages that further your piece’s heartbeat and cutting those that don’t—the old Michelangelo story about chipping away all the marble that’s not the angel. Both activities are guided by discernment. In spiritual circles, discernment means careful listening for what the Quakers call way. What path is
Cutting and Expanding Read More »