Author: Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Last month I wrote about the importance of dismissing the audience for the sake of creating a safe, private space where we can take creative risks.  The corollary to this, equally valuable, is that for writing to flourish we must at some point welcome the audience.  If a writer only considers the self the primary audience, the work becomes solipsistic and sloppy.  Our own minds, however bright, are only so big; our own lives, however expansive, are inevitably limited.  When we write solely for ourselves, as we do in a private journal, we human beings have a propensity to navel-gaze and obsess.  Unedited journals almost never get published for this reason; there’s simply too much shlock for most readers.

If we never consider an audience as we write, our work’s growth remains stunted.  The discipline of considering the reader is absolutely necessary to the development of creative work.  All art is essentially dialogue—between the artist and the viewer, between the artist and all artists who have come before, and between the artist and society.  The artist’s awareness of this conversation is what launches a work from the private realm into the public.  In literature, it’s this awareness that helps a writer identify the universal elements in the particulars of his or her narrative.  By setting our work in the context of history, social movements, religious thought, psychological explorations, and other external forces, we link the smallness of our memories (or imagined world) to that web of commonality that connects us as humans.  We remove ourselves from isolation and participate in community.

I believe the best time to welcome the audience into our writing process is after the first or second draft, after we’ve searched for the heart of our work and risked exposing some truth.  Gradually, as we move through the drafts, we can begin to ask questions that might open our story to external readers:  Have I introduced my characters, my setting, my questions thoroughly?  Why might an anonymous reader be interested in this work?  How might I capture his or her attention and raise the stakes?  How might I make my experience (or my character’s experience) available to the reader, so he or she is a participant rather than an observer?  What in my story touches the human experience, that cord of connection we all share?

Every spiritual journey worth its salt brings the journeyer back into community, where the fruits of solitude can provide nourishment beyond the bounds of one individual life.  Likewise with creative practice; what’s born in privacy gains texture and merit by moving into the public realm.  The craft of writing well is really a rigorous discipline through which we open our internal world to another, or to the Other.  This, I believe, is essentially what revision is about—seeing our material again and again, with eyes other than our own or with sight broadened by the wider world.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

“You must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants.  Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.”

When I came upon these words in Strunk and White’s classic writing handbook, Elements of Style, I felt pleased as punch.  For years I’ve tried to convince writing students to surround themselves with a safe, protective bubble as they draft projects and begin revising.  We all know how concern for our audience can loom over our shoulders, pestering us with questions like “What will your mother think?” and “Who will give a rat’s ass about that?” and presuming judgments about the inadequacy of our language or ideas or even our very impulse to write.  As soon as we allow that dreaded entity, “Audience”, into our writing room, we begin censoring and performing.  We deny our brilliant but quirky inner voice the freedom to emerge.

Say you’re able to give yourself permission in a first draft to be messy, heretical, revolutionary, stupid, and otherwise embarrassing.  “A careful first draft is a failed first draft,” Patricia Hampl writes; say your first draft is successful.  Your inclination may be to approach your second draft like Stephen King does: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”  And while I agree in principle, I’ve found that even the initial stages of revision benefit from a general disregard of audience.  How else can we ask the probing questions that will churn up more risky material?  How else will we feel safe enough to identify that pulsing heartbeat?  Often our real motivations for writing emerge after our material is on the page, and we need the freedom to be honest with ourselves without concern for our readers’ pleasure.

As every writer knows, it takes real will-power to set the future reader aside and “play to an audience of one.”  Whether at the beginning of a project or well into revision, this practice is really about peeling away layers of deception to arrive at a core reality—one that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comforted, as Mark Twain is reported to have said.  Our work needs us to be fully present, not distracted by what others will think.  This is what gives the process of writing the quality of serious spiritual listening, and what invites us into our better selves.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

No matter how much we know about our story’s content when we begin a creative project (be it fiction or creative nonfiction), unknowns lurk around every corner and it’s best, I believe, to think of our material as an untamed wilderness.  If we assume we know this territory, we close ourselves off to the possibility of discovery.  The reader’s experience will be adventurous only if the writer has embarked on a true journey, fraught with risk and vulnerability and mystery.  And so we begin with some direction and the desire to address certain, known topics, all the while staying open to surprise.

Peter Turchi is interested in maps as a metaphor for story.  Just as a map is an encoded representation of a real landscape, the printed story is an encoded representation of the human experience.  Turchi writes, “If we attempt to map the world of a story before we explore it, we are likely either to (a) prematurely limit our exploration, so as to reduce the amount of material we need to consider, or (b) explore at length but, recognizing the impossibility of taking note of everything, and having no sound basis for choosing what to include, arbitrarily omit entire realms of information.  The opportunities are overwhelming.  (This explains why it can be so difficult for beginning writers to embrace thorough revision—which is to say, to fully embrace exploration.  The desire to cling to that first path through the wilderness is both a celebration of initial discovery and fear of the vast unknown.” (Maps of the Imagination)

So our initial drafting is a fearless exploration of our story’s wilderness, and subsequent revisions continue to venture out into unknown territory until we know the boundaries of our story’s landscape.  Over the course of revision, the writer transforms his or herself from an explorer into a guide.  We grow familiar with the contours and shadows and geology of our material and better adept at sharing it with others.  Only toward the end of a lengthy revision process, when we thoroughly know our story, ought we turn our attention completely to the needs of our readers.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

I recently led a manuscript review for a second draft of a book-length memoir.  As often happens at this stage, the class discussed what the book was about at its core, helping the author articulate its purpose and drive, and then named the thematic threads that unify the many disparate stories.  Some of these themes were surprising to the author, most confirmed her intentions or instincts, and all needed development.  The class wanted more:  more reflection, more anecdotes that supported her primary exploration, more links between the narrative and the various questions the narrative raised.  Her manuscript was already a good 250+ pages, so I wasn’t surprised when she cornered me afterward and asked, “How can I possibly make all these changes without the book getting ridiculously long?”

I share her question because every manuscript goes through this stage.  The author has plenty of material.  The outer stories are complete and even polished.  Individual chapters feel done.  And yet the author discovers a need for greater unity and deeper purpose across the whole manuscript.  The chapters may stand alone well, but they’re not yet working together.  The surface of the story unfolds nicely across the book, but the inner ideas, questions, or explorations are ragged and shallow.  A whole new revision is necessary, one that requires the author to think in book-length thoughts and to uncover what I call the soul of the book.

How exactly do we do this?  The obvious and sometimes frustrating answer is to write more.  Once we’ve identified our primary themes, we often need to journal about them, creating space for more insights, more memories, and more supportive anecdotes to arise.  We need to journal away from the constraints of our draft to give us freedom to discover new material, and we need to journal within the context of crucial moments of our story as a way of excavating what lies beneath.  Then we can choose what new material will enhance the unifying themes, and insert it.

As I told my student, adding is only one means of developing themes.  I recommend it first, because by writing more we grow clearer in our understanding of what, exactly, our book is about.  Once we have a clear vision, however, most of the work of revising requires reframing and cutting.

By reframing, I mean looking at your old material through new lenses.  Usually the orientation of individual pieces of a manuscript shifts once those pieces are placed in the whole.  For example, I originally wrote the chapter of my memoir about biking across Wales thinking my whole book would be about biking.  My early draft emphasized externals like the strain on my body, the people I met, and my growing sense of independence.  Only later did I discover that the heartbeat of my book was in the connection between sexuality and spirituality.  I had to look at my biking stories through this lens, eliminating anecdotes that didn’t serve this heartbeat and polishing those anecdotes that did until they clearly illustrated how my physical being and spiritual being came alive over those months of solitude.  This looked like rewriting from scratch, although I was working with a fairly well-developed draft.

Oddly enough, we do our best work of deepening and strengthening themes across a book by eliminating what doesn’t serve those themes.  Here again is that old spiritual practice of letting go.  Once we’ve found the soul of our book, we must serve it by casting off all that steers us and our readers in the wrong direction.  This is simple living, literary-style—challenging, sometimes painful, but ultimately gratifying because we land on what’s most important.  Like Michelangelo and his block of marble, we eliminate everything that’s not angel and we’re left with the angel.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

I just finished rereading Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter for a class I’m teaching, and one of Hampl’s techniques I was most impressed with was her use of the recurring motif.  These images, references, and anecdotes crop up repeatedly through her memoir and serve to bind her otherwise wandering reflections together; they become a structural element, unifying the narrative.  I’d like to briefly look at three examples.

The first is quite small:  Hampl’s repeated references to Scott Fitzgerald.  Hampl’s memoir haunts what she calls “Old St. Paul,” and so her great love of Scott Fitzgerald’s work helps both to illuminate the setting and reveal her literary obsession.  Fitzgerald never becomes more than a passing reference, but his name is like a bell rung periodically throughout her story.  The reader thinks, “Oh yes!  Here we are again.”

The second example is a photograph of her young parents at a picnic.  She describes the photo in her opening pages and returns to the image periodically, using it as a window into her parents’ early lives.  When her mother grows bitter and her father is baffled by this transformation, Hampl refers to this photo as a way to remind the reader of who her mother had been.  The image becomes iconic the more Hampl revisits it, and the reader feels her bringing the story full circle.

Finally, she tells us early on that her uncle Frankie died a tragic death at the St. Paul brewery.  Each time she mentions Frankie in the narrative, we learn a bit more of the story—how he died, what his funeral procession was like, how his family mourned him.  An anecdote that she could have shared in the space of two consecutive pages unfolds in little pieces over two hundred.  Frankie becomes a touchstone for the reader; we sense Hampl milking this bit of drama for all its worth.  In a book that has very little plot, Frankie pulls us along.

I mention these because memoir writers often fear that their stories are so fragmented, they will never become a unified story.  But it takes very little to string fragments together into a unified whole.  Lest these observations seem craft-heavy, please note the tremendous power of these tiny bits of binding material.   Our stories are whole, despite how they seem, because our lives are singular and unified by our personalites.  By identifying the motifs (and themes and questions) that have inevitably shaped us, we are able to uncover the unity of our stories.  And this, ultimately, is spiritual work.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

When I teach personal essay writing, many students are surprised to learn that essays needn’t make a point or answer a question.  An essay may ask a question, explore it, and arrive at a better way to ask the question.  What makes an essay work is movement.  Readers need to arrive at a different place from where we were launched.

I’ve come to understand movement as fundamental to all good literature.  In an essay, movement may happen in the realm of ideas; in fiction or memoir, movement happens in character and plot; in poetry, movement occurs in an aesthetic or in the poet’s relationship to the topic.  Movement is the reason we read.  We want to be transported from one way of being into another, and to emerge from the book changed, however slightly.

For this reason, much of revision’s work is identifying and amplifying transformation within the text.  What real changes occur?  Where?  Usually the external changes are easy to identify—the events that impact character and move the plot forward.  These touchstones in the physical world are essential to good stories because they ground readers, meaning they help us embody the action and therefore stay engaged.  The internal changes are often harder to identify.  What are the subtle shifts in thought and emotion that influence characters’ actions?  This internal story is essential.  Without it, the plot has no inner life.  Finally, the narrator or the author experiences a transformation, however small, during the writing.  This shift may or may not appear in the text, but it is essential to giving the story vitality.

All three layers—the outer story, the inner story, and the narrator’s story—need sharpening in revision.  Usually a draft is strong in one arena and weak in others.  A narrative comprised entirely of outer story reads like an action movie, all plot and no character.  Readers may long for depth of meaning or the complexity of human relationships.  Too much outer story frequently leaves readers asking, “So what?”  A narrative comprised entirely of the inner story is also difficult to read.  We’re whole human beings, with senses and bodies and sexual drive and conversations and relational dynamics…Too much living in our heads begins to feel removed from reality.  We need moments of action and interaction to support the interior dialogue.  Finally, too much emphasis on the author’s transformation reads like a journal entry, self-absorbed and inaccessible to the reader.

A good revision exercise to help you identify movement is this:  On a large piece of blank paper, draw a timeline of your story’s external changes.  Then articulate the internal shifts that take place during this action.  How has your character (in the case of memoir, your younger self) changed in his or her thinking, feeling, and relationships?  If you cannot identify internal changes, consider whether the external action is necessary to your story.  If internal changes occur without accompanying external events, brainstorm ways to show in scenes (dialogue, body language, action, physical environment, etc) the internal life.

Finally, spend time journaling about your relationship to this project.  What’s in it for you?  Why are you writing?  What have you learned from the writing?  What might this project yet teach you?  This self-awareness about intention and motivation can inform your story.  My partner recently asked me, “In what ways do you wish you could grow up to be like your novel’s narrator?”  By exploring those humble, unformed parts of myself that are manifest in my book, I get a better understanding of my characters and the arc of my story.  Our stake in a project may appear overtly in the text or it may appear between the lines, but regardless we must know what it is for its movement to hook the reader.  –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

The best literature revolves around a central core of an idea or emotion—what I like to call the heartbeat.  The heartbeat pumps life into every artery and vein of a story.  It unifies.  It doesn’t prevent the inclusion of other themes and motifs, but it does rise to prominence.

This heartbeat almost never reveals itself during a first draft.  Our work during revision involves looking for hints of this heartbeat and drawing them forward.  One helpful technique for doing this is to write with the voice of a distanced narrator.  Rather than immersing yourself in the character who is your younger self (the former you, who experienced the events of your story), step back and reflect.  What do you make of these events today?  Why are you sharing them?  What’s at stake for you?  What might be at stake for your reader?

Whether or not these reflections get included in your manuscript, it is imperative that they become conscious.  We need to know the motivation behind our writing.  We need to know the significance of the events we’re relating, especially how they impact our present life.  We need to know why our readers might care, because this will reveal to us the universal truths within our story.  This level of awareness then shapes our revision.

When we push ourselves to this level of reflection, fresh insights emerge that help us to see our work—and our lives—in new light.

The reflective voice is very common in memoir and almost always present in personal essays.  As authors, we get to choose whether or not to include it.  Below are a few examples.

This first from Mary McCarthy’s A Catholic Girlhood:

The fear of appearing ridiculous first entered my life, as a governing motive, during my second year in the convent.  Up to then, a desire for prominence had decided many of my actions and, in fact, still persisted.  But in the eighth grade, I became aware of mockery and perceived that I could not seek prominence without attracting laughter.  Other people could, but I couldn’t.  This laughter was proceeding, not from my classmates, but from the girls of the class just above me, in particular from two boon companions, Elinor Heffernan and Mary Harty, a clownish pair—oddly assorted in size and shape, as teams of clowns generally are, one short, plump, and baby-faced, the other tall, lean, and owlish—who entertained the high-school department by calling attention to the oddities of the younger girls. …

It was just at this time, too, that I found myself in a perfectly absurd situation, a very private one, which made me live, from month to month, in horror of discovery.  I had waked up one morning, in my convent room, to find a few small spots of blood on my sheet; I had somehow scratched a trifling cut on one of my legs and opened it during the night.  I wondered what to do about this…

Note in the first paragraph the authoritative, knowledgeable tone of the narrator.  Using adult language and insight, she summarizes and interprets events from her childhood.  McCarthy is the master story-teller; her narrative perspective colors how we see and think about Elinor and Mary.  Thus she creates portraits of her characters without yet placing them in a scene.

I chose the second paragraph because it shows McCarthy transitioning from that distant narrative point of view into a scene.  The adult narrator tells us that her childhood situation is “absurd”; she’s still interpreting for us.  But then she leaves interpretation behind and we zoom in on Mary, the character.  She segues smoothly between both perspectives throughout the story:  “But precisely the same impasse confronted me when I was summoned to her office at recess-time.  I talked about my cut, and she talked about becoming a woman.  It was rather like a round, in which she was singing “Scotland’s burning, Scotland’s burning,” and I was singing “Pour on water, pour on water.”  Neither of us could hear the other, or, rather, I could hear her, but she could not hear me.”  The distanced narrator allows her to create the analogy of the round and help her readers understand the dynamics between Mary and the Mother Superior.

Here’s another example, this time from Bernard Cooper’s Truth Serum.

Like most children, I once thought it possible to divide the world into male and female columns.  Blue/Pink.  Roosters/ Hens.  Trousers/Skirts.  Such divisions were easy, not to mention comforting, for they simplified matter into compatible pairs.  But there also existed a vast range of things that didn’t fit neatly into either camp:  clocks, milk, telephones, grass.  There were nights I fell into a fitful sleep while trying to sex the world correctly.
Nothing typified the realms of male and female as clearly as my parents’ walk-in closets.  Home alone for any length of time, I always found my way inside them.  I could stare at my parents’ clothes for hours, grateful for the stillness, haunting the very heart of their privacy.
The overhead light in my father’s closet was a bare bulb.

Again, note the transition from exposition into scene.  The reflective voice allows Cooper to elaborate on his childhood mindset—one we’re very familiar with, and so before he’s begun his story about the closets (where he cross-dresses—something his reader might be less familiar with) he has invited us into his childhood conundrum.  Here’s his transition back out:

…A make-up mirror above the dressing table invited my self-absorption.  Sound was muffled.  Time slowed.  It seemed as if nothing bad could happen as long as I stayed within those walls.
Though I’d never been discovered in my mother’s closet, my parents knew that I was drawn toward girlish things—dolls and jump rope and jewelry—as well as to the games and preoccupations that were expected of a boy.

Here you can see how the reflective voice serves as connective tissue, reminding the reader of the story’s primary theme and doing some interpretive work.  When authors choose to include the reflective voice in memoir, we do so not because scenes don’t speak for themselves—they always do if they’re working well—but because the author wishes them to serve some other purpose as well.  In this case, Cooper is exploring the permeable boundaries between the sexes and showing the hurtful impact of cultural norms on a child.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

When writers, and especially memoir writers, first begin generating a manuscript, we often understand our words to be extensions of our deepest self.  What we’ve written is an external manifestation of our very being.  Our identity is bound up in the black print of our creation—and rightly so.  This level of over-identification helps invest our words with drive and passion.  The best writing emerges when the author’s very being is at stake.  Writers are often private about these early jottings; they feel too close, too vulnerable, too precious.  First drafts are almost always raw, both in their language and their emotion.  Some writers feel they’ve bled on the page, or spilled their guts.  There are no boundaries between writer and what’s written.

Compare this to a final draft we send to the publisher, or to the print version that arrives in the reader’s hands.  Unlike a diary, which never meets a reader, a literary work is intended to interact with an audience.  In the end, the author falls away; all that’s left is the text and the reader.  The writing is no longer a verb, but a noun—a thing, an object.  The writer’s work is done.  The nexus of creativity happens between the reader and the page.

While our original state of over-identification is good and necessary for a first draft (and even a second or third), eventually those writers interested in connecting with an audience must transition from thinking about our manuscripts as an extension of ourselves—an extra limb—to an object, external and independent.  This happens gradually, as we wean our identity from those inanimate marks on the page.  Slowly we realize we can make choices about how we tell our story, rather than being wedded to the initial version; we need to add details before the story can come alive in the mind of the reader; we need to listen for what’s missing; we need to heed the story’s agenda.  As we journey through revision, the independent life of our writing grows more apparent.  Indeed, each piece has an agenda slightly separate—and more challenging—than our own.  Each piece has a unique heartbeat which pumps vitality through the pages.  Slowly we come to understand ourselves as authors, listening and shaping, and our work as a creation.

This phenomenon becomes most apparent when we show our work to colleagues for feedback.  The best feedback does not respond to the author, regardless of how present or absent he or she is in the work; it responds to the work itself as it stands apart from the author.  As writers, we do well to understand this distinction.  If a reader has a question, it is addressed to the work and not the author.  The work, as an independent entity, must answer for itself.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Here’s a common scenario with intermediate creative nonfiction writers:  They’ve gotten over the initial hurdles to writing true stories—fear of what others will think, mistrust of their memories, difficulties establishing the writing habit—and they’ve experienced the rush of elation that comes with drafting.  They may have even dabbled in revision and overcome their resistance to meddling with their first words.  They’ve fleshed out scenes, added dialogue, paid attention to character development; they’ve fiddled with craft and made worthy changes.  But at some point, all creative nonfiction writers (and, I would argue, writers of all literary genres) must seriously consider revising their content as well as their craft.  Revision is not simply about evaluating and changing the form of our work; it’s also about adding layers of insight to the content.  And when our content is the material of our lives, this means doing serious emotional work.

Most writing students quit at this point.

The version of their life they wanted to write about proves a tad false or shallow or incomplete.  Sometimes they know it; sometimes they insist otherwise.  But before their writing can work for a reader, they must call this flawed version into question, asking themselves if there aren’t other ways of telling the story, other insights into what happened, and more emotional nuances than they’ve first allowed.  This is the stage of the revision process where the writer pays attention to the inner story, that secret emotional world beneath action and dialogue and character.  This is the stage where the story asserts its terrifying agenda, often overturning our own.  Of course the story has made demands of us all along, but midway through the revision process, usually when we think we can rest on our laurels, the demands grow dreadfully serious.  We must take emotional risks.  We must examine our deepest motivations.  We must admit we might not know the outcome of our story.

Techniques for navigating this stage range from journaling prolifically to entering therapy—whatever helps you reexamine what you assumed you knew.  A trusted reader might pepper your draft with probing questions that you then answer, regardless of your resistance.  I often challenge myself to begin drafting from scratch; is there another version of this story I haven’t yet uncovered?  And of course time often sifts away falsehoods and raises truisms to the light.

Carol Bly wrote, “The greatest nonfiction writers are the ones who are willing to put up with extremely uncomfortable, miserable thoughts, for days and weeks and years on end.”  Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it?  And yet this is where break-throughs happen, and where your greatest satisfactions will lie.  The best creative nonfiction is true, about both our personal journey and human nature.  Becoming a speaker for this truth doesn’t come cheaply but is well worth the demand.    –Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Poor revision, unfairly maligned due to a quirk of human nature!   We beasts prefer prowling on familiar territory, rooting up the same soil with the same scratching of our forelegs.   We know the terrain of a first draft:   the blank page, the tentative start, the discomfort of seeing our brilliant thoughts so diminished in print, the splash of joy when the words come, the adrenaline rush of stumbling onto insights or memories or characters we didn’t know we had, the satisfaction of completion.   We know that landscape and we’re quite attached to it, for good reason–it’s born much fruit and served us well.   The gifts of that first draft are worth cherishing.   And while we may admit the draft is rough, we also know it sparkles in places, and we’re unwilling to diminish that sparkle with the insult of revision.

Lest I discredit the rare genius, there are those who are able to revise in their heads, whose first draft is perfect, complete with layers of insight and meaning.   Those writing prior to the invention of the word processor were forced to economize in their writing process, and I believe were more mentally fit for the task than we sloppy, Microsoft Word-era writers.   I’m willing to concede that occasionally a writer comes along, lucky soul, who is able to draft a multifaceted piece in one go-round.   But they are few and far between.   I’ve yet to meet one.
The rest of us schmucks can’t depend on the brilliance of our being to smoothly translate our thoughts into good literature.

Our first drafts are flawed.   Our attachment makes this difficult to see.   This is the same phenomenon which makes family members, especially parents, miserable critics of our work.   Mom wants to see us succeed too badly; Dad is too worried about what others will think; neither has any objectivity because love and pride and self-consciousness are in the way.   When we look at our first drafts, love and pride and self-consciousness get tangled up in our material.   Even if we recognize the flaws, we’re satisfied.   After all, this is our baby!   (As an aside, the stage of writing my mother is most baffled by is revision.   “Isn’t it good enough yet ?” she asks repeatedly as I spend years revising.)

I’ve come to think of writers’ relationship with first drafts as better the devil you know.   Sure, the draft is flawed; sure, it’s only one of a dozen ways to approach this subject; sure, my language is loose in places.   But look at this lovely twist, here at the end!   I couldn’t mess with that by attempting a revision.   Or look at this streak of fine writing, or this brilliant insight!   Or–here’s a fine, devilish trick–do you have any idea how much work I’ve already put into this piece, how much of my heart is already invested?   I couldn’t possibly mess up this draft with revision.

Note how such attachment mires us writers.   Suddenly the great adventure of writing ends.   We put down the pen and file the pages, which then go nowhere.   Or if we send them out to be published, they get rejected and we give up.   But we’ve only scratched the surface of our subject!   There’s so much left to discover, so many more opportunities for growth, so many layers of insight yet to emerge.   Revision scares us because it’s a whole new landscape to explore, and now that we’ve taken one risk with our first draft we prefer to stay put.

But if you save your first draft rather than revising over that file, nothing you’ve written will be lost.   You can always pull out that brilliant sentence and use it again.   The a-ha moment at the end of your rough draft can become the premise of your second draft, and perhaps another a-ha will strike you before you reach the revision’s end.   If a second brilliant sentence comes to you, then your draft has two brilliant sentences and two a-ha’s!   So much is possible.

Thus nonattachment is central to the work of good writing.   Every bit of prose that emerges from our pens is a gift, and rather than hold it tightly we must learn to let it go.   In the mysterious ways of such things, letting go only magnifies rather than diminishes the gifts.   This is the spiritual practice of revision.   If we choose, we can apply the lessons of this practice to our lived lives as well, allowing our very selves to be revised.
–Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew