Revision -- change for the better or worse?

[corvus]

After finishing my NaNoWriMo novel, I decided to check out NaNoEdMo -- National Novel Editing Month. The headline article of the NaNoEdMo webpage turned out to be this really discouraging piece about how your novel sucks, despite all the blood and sweat you put into it, and you'll never get it published unless you flay it alive, etc., etc.

 

It's not that I disagree, necessarily -- I do believe in revision -- but here's the question: how can you tell if the revision is good? What if you make edits that cut out the original spirit of the work, the ether that gave it life? Recently I looked at some of the poems I did for my poetry workshop, and in almost every case, I preferred the original draft to the revision. o__O The road to hell is paved with good intentions. How can you tell that this cut is good and necessary, and not an excess of editorial zeal? After all, a flawed work with life is better than a perfect corpse.

[Duncan Ryder]

After finishing my NaNoWriMo novel, I decided to check out NaNoEdMo -- National Novel Editing Month. The headline article of the NaNoEdMo webpage turned out to be this really discouraging piece about how your novel sucks, despite all the blood and sweat you put into it, and you'll never get it published unless you flay it alive, etc., etc.

 

It's not that I disagree, necessarily -- I do believe in revision -- but here's the question: how can you tell if the revision is good? What if you make edits that cut out the original spirit of the work, the ether that gave it life? Recently I looked at some of the poems I did for my poetry workshop, and in almost every case, I preferred the original draft to the revision. o__O The road to hell is paved with good intentions. How can you tell that this cut is good and necessary, and not an excess of editorial zeal? After all, a flawed work with life is better than a perfect corpse.

 

One of my journalism profs used to say...there's no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. I think that's right -- to a point. My personal rule is no more than three drafts (unless I put something away for a long time because it isn't working.) After that, my general experience is it doesn't get better, it just gets different... I use this rule with all my writing, including the stuff that pays the bills.

 

It's absolutely true that you can edit something to death. I think that's esp. true of poetry. You can kill the spirit of it. I think poetry is always a special case thoguh. There are no rules to it that I've ever figured out. For me, there is a very fine balance to a poem, getting the words to balance just right. Sometimes they just come out that way, and sometimes first "drafts" are really just sketches that need to be developed. I think it's about learning when to stop, about developing and learning to trust your inner ear. Sometimes I work a poem or a series of poems for a long time, sometimes the first version is pretty much it. But the agenda is always my own; I work with it until I'm satisfied with it, and then I stop. It's my personal inner ear that has to be pleased.

 

(One bit of practical advice: never destroy drafts. I keep every draft. That way if I feel something is lost, I can go back and find the thread, find where I meandered off.)

 

in terms of a long piece of work, like a novel, I think revision is virtually always a major necessity (unless you write like Conrad... who basically wrote his novels in his head, and when he actually committed them to paper did so in a single draft... ) because the first draft is often about getting your head around the entirity of the story...