To Stop Revising

            Revision is a process that scholars tend to worship as if it is a form of religion. Teachers and fellow students alike use their numbers of drafts written as a trophy to show how much dedication and skill went in to a product. The more drafts, the better the text must be, of course. Many say that you can never truly draft until you’re finished and satisfied with a product, because there is always more revision that can be made. At some point, someone must come take it away from you, and that is why you have to stop revising. Revising, however, can also be something that hinders our writing. There is nothing less personable than an over-revised and style-less text. A text where the author has completely edited out their personal voice out so much that it could be the user manual for a leaf blower. So where is the fine line between revision preferences to produce the best possible piece, that still has a personal touch? Revision is of course a necessary part of writing, or at least, successful writing, but it can also by dangerous for stylistic writing.

            Revising is almost an occult religion in the world of academia. Jeff Hirsch, aspiring author and creator of a self-titled blog and website, says he likes to refer to revision like the triage area of the emergency room. A voluminous number of torn up corpses are coming in, all seem high priority but you can only work on one at a time, the corpse is bleeding from all orifices and must be patched together enough to sustain life before sending it to the real surgeon, of the final draft. He recommends attacking revision in the following ways:

1. Don’t be afraid to ask people what they liked. We can be so afraid of criticism that we ask people not to tear it apart when it could really help us.
2. Ask one question (his favorite is “If you could give me only one single note, what would it be?”).
3. Run away! Take some space away from your text while mulling over the feedback.
4. To hell with Faulkner. Don’t start cutting phrases out willy nilly because an author told you a quote about “killing our darlings”.
5. You’re not a writer, you’re a sculptor. He uses Michaelangelo’s quote “In every block or marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me… I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it…”.

Here’s a fun note, I found a typo in Hirsch’s blog, so even though he is an exuberant revisionist, it appears he could’ve used one more draft for this one.

            Edward Fitzgerald is a poet who comes to mind when it comes to the topic of extreme revisionism. He only had one truly famous poem, Rubaiyat, and spent the rest of his life revising it. Even more interesting, the very first version seems to be the most popular of all. Another notable member of the church of revisionism is William Wordsworth. His Prelude was first written in 1805 and he continued to revise and revise without even attempting to publish it. Wordsworth would’ve surely continued to revise if it wasn’t for his death, forty-five years after his first draft his Prelude was published post-mortem. However, unlike Fitzgerald, the revised versions of the Prelude are generally considered to be better works, so at least Wordsworth was accomplishing something with his revision.

            Many believe that revision is just fixing commas and spelling, a common misconception. This is actually the process of proofreading. Those who revise are more so looking for ideas that are too predictable, a weak thesis, and messy organization. Simply proofreading errors like this will not be overall beneficial, because you’re only hiding the bigger fault. Much like putting a slipcover on your grandma’s sagging old couch that her dog definitely gave birth on. You can hide the stains, but you’ll never get rid of that smell. The next half step from proof reading is editing. You look for better words than some of the weak ones used, avoid repetition, and so on, all of this is important to achieve effective writing, but if your ideas are poor then phrasing them in a different manner isn’t going to help much.

            With all of this, it’d be easy to assume that some of history’s greatest writers must’ve also been history’s greatest revisers, but that simply isn’t the case. According to the Boston Globe, revision is seen to be a more modern tactic for writing. They state that most texts over 100 years old only went through small editing. Hannah Sullivan, English professor at Oxford University and author of the book The Work of Revision, argues that revision as we as scholars and academics have come to know it is a 20^th century creation. Modernists like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf were some of the big writers that started to worship the act of revising, causing the popularity of the task to grow as they rose with success. Sullivan states that these authors “revised overtly, passionately, and at many points in the lifespan of their texts”. Sullivan urges that these authors were so obsessed with revising because the whole point of modernism was to challenge people with something entirely new and breaking tradition.

            Another historical element that enhanced the surge of revision is claimed to be the invention and rise in popularity of the typewriter. The Work of Revision makes a case that what we write often comes from how we write. Using the traditional pen and paper may leave you more connected to your paper with a passionate sense of camaraderie between you and what you have written, making you less likely to want to change it.  With the invention of the typewriter, using a machine to write could make you feel like connected to what you are writing, thereby giving you the feeling that it isn’t good enough or worthwhile. This could be a cause of modernists extreme revision policies, making many many drafts in an effort to gain connectedness to their works and spend the same amount of quality time with a piece as you would have done while handwriting it.

            During the 19^th century, Romantics popularized the idea of revision hurting you text. They showed resisting the urge to revise as an extremely moral and virtuous thing to do. They had the impression that the bet writing flowed spontaneously from the heart and shouldn’t be contained or edited. Your most true, raw, self was presented in your first draft, and that is what you wanted the world to see of yourself. Lord Byron once wrote in a letter “I am like the tiger, if I miss my first spring- I go growling back to my Jungle. There is no second. I can’t correct”. I think this quote is incredible for what I feel like my writing and revising style is. The first text you apply to a page is most accurate to one’s true self. Revising, in a sense, is almost like cheating. In a statewide-standardized test there is no second draft. You are handed four pieces of paper and are simply told to write. There is no “Teacher, I used all my paper, can I have more for my second draft?”.  You get one shot, and whatever you put on those four sheets of paper is exactly what you deserve.

            Sullivan foresees another anti-revision revolution in the works. With most people, writing occurs via a computer screen, only printing the final copy. This goes completely against the ideal set up for deep revision, which requires making many copies of a single text to see how it has evolved throughout each new draft. Never having a physical copy until completion will, according to Sullivan, may “paradoxically make wholesale revision, the kind that leads to radically rethinking our work, more difficult”.

            I, for one, will champion this newer anti-revision movement. Although self-editing and maybe even slight proofreading are important and even integral to texts, deep revision is very dangerous. Revision is a wasteful process, cutting out ideas and plot lines that could be the exact ones to affect your reader most. As the author, you truly have no idea what will be the kicker that each member of the audience connects with, so if you truly want to write with the purpose of bettering the lives of others, then you are only doing a deep dis-service to yourself and your writing by cutting your own, well deserved ideas.

            So if you are with me in this revision revolution, throw your final drafts in the garbage can. There is certainly something so freeing about doing a singular draft and trusting that your original ideas are enough. More times written does not equal a more significance text. Trust that you as a writer have enough value to not pick yourself, and your work, which is an extension of your soul, apart. Second-guessing through extreme revision is the destructor of the creative voice.

Works Cited

Browne, Gerald D. “Edward Fitzgerald’s Revisions.” Biographical Society of America, New York, pp. 69-94.

Fehrman, Craig. “Revising your writing again? Blame the Modernists.” The Boston Globe, Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC, 30 June 2013, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/29/revising-your-writing-again-blame-modernists/WhoH6Ih2kat2RE9DZV3DjP/story.html.

Hirsch, Jeff.  “5 Thoughts on Revision.” Jeff Hirsch, Cloudspace,  2 Feb. 2011, https://www.jeff-hirsch.com/blog/5-thoughts-on-revision.

Leader, Zachary. “Wordsworth, Revision, and Personal Identity.” ELH, Vol. 60, No. 3, Autumn 1993, pp. 651-683.

Sullivan, Hannah. The Work of Revision, Harvard University Press, 1^st June 2013.