Revision - Building a book, finishing a book

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Revision
Building a book, finishing a book

When I first started teaching writing, I had a student who told me he didn’t believe in revision. “First idea, best idea,” he said, misquoting Jack Kerouac. He was a Kerouac fan, and whenever I suggested revisions, he’d quote passages from Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957). I finally suggested he do some research to see whether his hero, in fact, revised. When I was working on Virginia Woolf’s manuscripts in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, I met a railroad conductor, a fan of Kerouac’s, who was studying Kerouac’s manuscripts. He told me Kerouac did rewrite and did revise and that his editor also worked on the manuscript of On the Road (1957) before publication.

Even so, my student wouldn’t budge from his intractable stance even though his work, admittedly, continued to be unsatisfactory. I suggested he could try revising—it was an important skill for a writer to learn—and if he didn’t like the result, he could always revert to the original. I told him that many writers I knew revised many times, and it was only through this process that they learned what their books were about.

My student thought that if he continued writing, he’d one day be skilled enough so that his first—and only draft—would be wonderful. “It’ll never happen,” I thought, but didn’t say but likely should have, because I didn’t know a single writer who didn’t except, perhaps, certain Zen practitioners writing haiku.

Darin Strauss—author of Chang and Eng (2000), a novel about conjoined twins, and the memoir Half a Life (2010), about his experience of inadvertently killing a girl with his car when he was a teenager, among other works—in discussing whether writing can be taught, echoed Jonathan Lethem’s belief that “talent was kind of meaningless.” It’s the writers, Strauss says, who “keep trying, keep trying,” who allow themselves “to be bad” at the beginning of the process, who trust that after much hard work and countless revisions, they’ll complete a work, who have the best chance of becoming writers.

Strauss observed that, of the writers he knew as a graduate student, “it wasn’t the most talented people who moved on—it was the people who could take their first draft and make it a second draft.” Almost every writer at a certain level can write a decent first draft. But it takes grit and determination to climb back into a work and revise and revise again and again. It takes humility, too—a willingness to say, “This isn’t good enough yet; it needs more work.” And a dedication to the process of doing the work, coupled with a belief that, in time, we’ll likely produce a completed work.

When Paul Auster was writing his memoir The Invention of Solitude, his first prose work—he’d written and published poetry before—he became confused about the form the book should take. He’d written the first part of his narrative, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” in first person, about his father’s lonely life, about his grandmother murdering his grandfather—a history Auster learned by chance when he was a grown man—and the effect of that act upon his father and upon him.

He’d begun the second part, “The Book of Memory,” about how he composed the work, about chance, about his years in Paris, about his reading, in the first person, too. “But there was something I didn’t like about it,” Auster said, although he couldn’t figure out why he was dissatisfied. Still, he continued writing, until he felt he “had to stop.”

Before returning to the work, before revising the second section, Auster put the book away, and “meditated for several weeks” about the challenge he was facing. He realized that “the problem was the first person” narrator he was using. In the first section, about his father, using the first person worked because Auster was “seeing him” from his point of view. But using first person for his own narrative, Auster discovered, meant “I couldn’t see myself anymore.” He realized that he needed to revise the work by shifting the second part to third person. Then, he could “get a certain distance from myself,” which made it possible for him to see himself, which “made it possible” for him to complete the book.

Auster says that in writing his books, he is “[s]lowly blundering my way toward consciousness”: he “find[s] the book in the process of doing it.” He speaks of using notebooks as “a house for words, as a secret place for thought and self-examination.” But when asked by an interviewer whether he works from a plan or from previous materials, he answered that he begins a novel with what he describes as “a buzz in the head.” He starts, he says, “with the first sentence and then I push on until I’ve reached the last,” working one paragraph at a time. For Auster, the paragraph is his “natural unit of composition.” And he keeps working on a single paragraph, “writing and rewriting” it by hand until he’s “reasonably satisfied,” until he’s determined “it has the right shape, the right balance, the right music.” The process of completing work on a single paragraph can take Auster “a day … or half a day, or an hour, or three days.” Once it’s finished, Auster types it—“each book has a running manuscript and a typescript beside it”—and then later, he’ll revise the typed page yet again.

Although he has a “sense of the trajectory of the story” from the beginning, and perhaps the first and perhaps the last sentence also, “everything keeps changing as I go along,” Auster says. Each book is a surprise; none “ever turned out as I thought it would. Characters and episodes disappear; other characters and episodes develop” as Auster works.

Auster often makes “radical shifts” in his novels as he composes them. If he knew everything in advance, he says, the process “wouldn’t be very interesting.” Finding out what the book is about through writing and revising it, Auster has said, is “the adventure of the job.”

When he was writing The Book of Illusions, his tenth novel, about how his protagonist, David Zimmer, dealt with his wife’s and son’s deaths by searching for an elusive silent-film comedian, Auster kept changing his “ideas about the story right up to the last pages.” When he was writing Mr. Vertigo, his novel set in the late 1920s, about a rescued orphan who becomes a member of a traveling circus troupe, he initially conceived it as a “short story of thirty or forty pages.” But the work “took off and seemed to acquire a life of its own,” developing into a nearly three-hundred-page-long picaresque novel.

The act of revision allows writers to discover the hidden potential in their own work and to arrive at undreamed of levels of meaning. For Auster and for many other writers, revision doesn’t simply refine the language on the page. It’s the heart and soul of the process. And, as Auster indicates, by far the most exciting phase of composing a work.