It's interesting to be talking about revision in two classes at once -- in Karen Uehling's nonfiction class, we just read a piece by Patricia Hampl called Memory and Imagination. This passage stood out to me:
"It still comes as a shock to realize that I don't write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know. Is it possible to convey to a reader the enormous degree of blankness, confusion, hunch and uncertainty lurking in the act of writing?"
This uncertainty Hampl talks about was in my mind while reading both of these essays on the process of revision. I tend to side more with Harris' multi-draft writers, those who need to take their sweet ass time getting to the point, and often don't even know what the point is until actually arriving there, or maybe some time afterward.
I can also sympathize with the feeling that a piece of writing is never really "done." I get a feeling for when it's complete-ish, but I can always go back to something I've written and find a few things to improve on. I think that's what terrifies me about publication -- once it's out there, I've kind of forfeited my ability to revise. I had a poem published once that I later made some changes to, and now I feel weirdly misrepresented by the early draft that's available for folks to read, while the "true" draft sits in a notebook somewhere in one of my desk drawers. If I somehow were able to find it, I'm positive that I'd still be able to find things to tweak and improve.
When Murray talks about this fear of "the absence of discovery," I get a glimpse of the way I used to write. I spent the majority of my academic career (I'm including middle/high school in this) as a single-draft type of writer. I never got along well with teachers who forced rough drafts on me, rejecting all manner of creative or abstract brainstorming activities. For me, writing an essay was as easy as sitting down and finishing it all in one go.
I suppose this speaks also to the simplicity of the assignments I used to receive, but it was some time after I started college that I changed my tactics. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but writing, now, is a fairly messy process for me. It involves oodles of internal revision, thinking about writing, thinking about thinking, and thinking about what I've written after actually writing it. I think about my writing in the way I might think about someone else's poem that I'm workshopping -- what does this mean to me? What do I take away from this?
Thinking about my writing in the context that it has something secret to offer me, like it's a way to tell myself something that I didn't know I knew, is a powerful motivator to revise. Once I can kind of figure out what the point is, I'm able to revise from that frame of reference. For me, writing is kind of like dreaming. It's normal, but it's also magic, and I have a lot to learn from critically analyzing it after the fact.
I took a class with Don Murray in the early eighties while pursuing a graduate degree in nonfiction writing. He later became a mentor and friend. Little did I know that his celebration of writing as a form of discovery and learning would profoundly change the way I thought the work. Don would lead us on an in-class writing exercise, and his first question was always this: "What surprised you?" Reading about your own evolution as a writer brought this to mind, especially your insight that writing can be a way of finding out what you didn't know you knew. I would say that this is the most important thing I ever learned about writing, and I've taught it to generations of students. But as Muriel Harris suggests in her descriptions of one and multi-draft writers, this does demand a willingness to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty as one follows their own language to find out what they think. I don't think we're very inclined that way in high school, which may explain your one-drafter approach back then.
ReplyDeleteI love that quote about writing to find out what you know! It’s kind of the crux of why writing one draft is so important to me; something weird happens to my self confidence when it takes a lot of time to phrase my thoughts and going back to edit them later can also be unsettling. I never did think about that being attributed to the simplicity of the assignments, or maybe it’s been my gettng more complicated as a person, haha.
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