How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Revision

Image from www.newyorker.com

 

Fair warning: this post is not political. It is for all the writers out there who hate revising their work.

Guys, I know the feeling. You labor over something for weeks, months, even years, and when you reach the end, or what you think is the end, it’s so very tempting to stop, put down your pen or push aside your keyboard, and break out the champagne. You love what you’ve written, if only because (1) it’s finished and (2) it meets your expectations, which, let’s be honest, have been systematically lowered throughout the duration of your project. The last thing you want to do is pick over every word and line you’ve sweated over in a pointless effort to tear it apart.

I used to feel that way, too. In fact, I suppose a pretty substantial part of me still does. But today, on the eve of 2017, at the end of a year that so many people are calling a very bad year, if not a catastrophic one, I pause in my own revision work to offer other writers a new way of looking at revision.

I am learning to love this part of writing, because I see it as a perfect marriage between creativity and analysis. Note that I am  using the word “analysis,” not the word “criticism,” because that’s too negative for what I think we do in revision. The job of revision is to help make something better, not to tear it apart. (Tearing it apart should come later, during the critical review, but only in as much as the critic must tear something apart in order to see what it’s made of and how it works. A good critic will always put the work back together again after she does the work of criticism.)

My secret to loving revision, then, is this: Revising a work must involve a willing, enthusiastic attitude. The writer must regard the task of revising with excitement, because it is this part of writing that really shows the essence of craftsmanship, that separates those who write for fun (whether they are published authors or not) from those who write because they are compelled to do so. But how can a writer change their attitude about this pain-in-the-ass time sink? I’ve devised a very simple solution. Instead of hoping that your work contains few mistakes and needs minimal revision, you should assume that it houses many mistakes, some of them not easy to find. Rather than bewailing the need to revise, growing bored and frustrated with finding topical errors, learn to use revision as a sonar device to locate the buried as well as the superficial mistakes. Once found, even deep mistakes are usually fairly easy to fix–much easier to fix than most writers would think. I’ve found that when you let go of the inherent desire not to have to fix something and give yourself over to the idea that fixing it is not only a good thing to do, but an entertaining and satisfying aspect of the nature of the job, revision loses its drudgery. It becomes a pleasant and in some ways delightful stage in the work of creation, and it invites the best use of problem-solving tactics–and creativity–a writer possesses.

There you have it. Stop avoiding revision. (You know you have.) Change your attitude–for real. Love revision and all it offers. Because it’s revision, and not the mere act of writing itself, that makes us real artists. Any third-grader can write. Only a real writer has the ability, and the drive, to revise.

–Offered on this last day of 2016 with a minimum of revision

The Observer Effect in Local Politics

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, a painting by English Painter Joseph Wright (1768). Image from Wikimedia.org

 

I used to try to encourage people to become more active in politics by saying, “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” I thought that in order for democracy to work well, people needed to get out and be part of the political system of which, whether they acknowledge it or not, they are a part. I believed that taking action–by running for office, working to get candidates elected, and keeping abreast of current issues–was the best, and perhaps the only, way to make government accountable to those it serves.

I now see that I was wrong.

Local politics is in fact the only level of politics that really matters to most of us, because it’s the only sphere of politics which most of us can affect. And local government functions better when it is played out in front of an audience. In other words, people behave differently when other people are watching them: they are more careful with their words and their behavior. I discovered this by accident; in the wake of profound disillusionment from the election, I took the only action I could. I started attending local governmental meetings: a city council meeting here, a coffee hour with a state representative there. I began to follow the local political news, just to have a sense of what was going on in my little world. It wasn’t much, but it was all that I could do, and I was tired of sitting at home in disgust, frustration, and fear.

What I discovered is that democracy is subject to what is called, in physics, “The Observer Effect,” which states that the mere act of observing a system changes it. Once we set out to observe something, even as a silent bystander, we have an effect on that which we observe. While this might make trying to get a good measurement of electrons impossible, it works to our advantage in politics. We can, as spectators, effect the changes we want to see in governance. With very little effort–by just showing up–we can begin to make our local political units more accountable, and hopefully, more honest and effective.

And so, I want to correct my earlier statement. Democracy, at its lowest but its most important level, can indeed be a spectator sport. We don’t all have to run for office, making speeches and participating in debates. We don’t even have to study the issues, although it would be better if we did. All we really need to do is show up and let our elected representatives know that we are, in fact, watching them. By doing so, we will inspire them to consider their ideas and words–and ultimately their actions–more carefully and thoughtfully. And we will do our part, however small and seemingly insignificant, to make sure that democracy not only survives, but thrives, during this difficult time.