“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
— Thomas Mann
Writing is harder work than most laypeople realize, requiring no less discipline than any other craft, and the revision process is often the most challenging part of it. Writers have a complicated relationship with revision. Some writers embrace it; others dread it. Then there’s the group I belong to — those who love-hate it. The pendulum swings from sleepless nights and the I-can’t-look-at-this-again mindset to renewed curiosity, energy, and even passion for the work. Every writer experiences the revision process differently.
What Is Revision?
So, what is revision and what does it entail?
Let’s start with what revision is not. It is not simply swapping out vague words for precise ones, or cleaning up punctuation or spelling or grammar, or limiting adjectives or cutting adverbs. These issues are, of course, addressed as you review your work, but true revision insists on much more.
Revision requires you to dig deeper and reread your work as a first-time reader would, seeing it with fresh eyes. (The word revision, derived from Latin revisionem, means “a seeing again.”) When we revise in fiction, we aim to see our story anew while re-examining what we’ve written, looking for connections, complexities, and meaning in scenes and characterization and setting, ones that we may not have noticed before. That’s when those “aha” moments occur. Oh, that’s what’s going on here, that’s what my character means, that’s what my story is trying to say. Be curious when revising, and open. Every draft offers the writer a greater understanding of their story.
Rereading your work-in-progress, Alice McDermott tells us, “is not so much a matter of concentrating on what you’ve already said — it’s learning to notice the lights and shades, the illimitable views that exist in the grayest conversations, the simplest incidents.” George Saunders recommends trying “not to bring too many ideas about what the story is doing [but to] just SEE what it’s doing. In other words, read along with a red pen and react in real time.” Are their places where you feel more bored or bewildered than engaged or intrigued? Do you find your interest waning the same time your story loses steam? “Revision,” Saunders tells us, “is a chance for the writer’s intuition to assert itself over and over.”
Revise to Know More
A draft is fluid. “A work in progress,” Peter Ho Davies explains, “is work in motion, a single draft no more than a freeze frame.” We write to know, he says, and we “revise to know more.” In writing the first draft, “we learn the story we’re telling.”
When we begin writing our first draft, we have the kernel of an idea for our story, which grows and morphs as we progress through pages and chapters. By the time we’ve written to the end of a draft, we’ve discovered aspects of our story we may not have known at the start. Perhaps it’s a clearer sense of our characters’ motives, or the realization that our story lacked focus due to competing ideas, or we understood how place is tied to our protagonist’s needs. In the writing of our next draft, we explore further what we’ve uncovered. In doing so, we come closer to grasping our characters and their dilemmas, their world, their story. “Every draft, even the first one,” Alice McDermott says, “stirs our unconscious understanding.”
“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect.… Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you’ve come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.”
— Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginnings
And when that happens—when that light shines bright — revision reinvigorates the writer and rekindles the enthusiasm and curiosity that inspired the inception of work.
Reluctant to Revise
So, if the process of revision can lead to discovery and evoke pleasure and excitement, why does it strike fear in so many writers’ hearts?
The reason for that resistance varies from writer to writer. Some writers, overwhelmed and exhausted, can’t face going through their story one more time. Others cling to their original — but perhaps ill-conceived — scene, character, or plot. They’ve become inflexible, having worked too hard and too long on the piece they love. Maybe they’re not ready to hear Annie Dillard’s warning about writing “that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, [may be] barely audible to anyone else.”
Still, the writer may inherently know something is amiss in their work, something doesn’t jive or sounds off-key, but their reluctance to revise a beloved character or scene or setting may be clouding their vision. They can’t identify their missteps. They can’t see what’s not working on the page. That’s truer for beginners than for more-experienced writers. Seasoned writers are more practiced in the process of revision and know with every draft their story evolves and comes closer to the story it was meant to be. The novice writer doesn’t realize — not yet at least — what it takes to deliver a finished manuscript. They don’t know that their favorite book may have undergone five or fifteen or twenty-five revisions before publication.
Step Away from the Vehicle
What’s the best way to help you get in the mindset to revise? Give yourself some distance from your work. “Step away from the vehicle,” Zadie Smith tells us. I always suggest to clients to set their work aside for a month or more. After some time away from it and when you’re ready and feeling more receptive, then commence that close rereading. Notice your reaction to things — when you feel connection or confusion or indifference or exasperation — and then consider why. “Examine all things intensely and relentlessly,” Dillard advises. “Do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.”
Peter Ho Davies tells us we revise “to understand our intent, to understand our own stories, to understand ourselves.” But how do we know when we’re done revising? “When you understand why you told the story in the first place,” says Davies, “[when you understand] what your intent actually was all along…. Doneness means we’re done with the story, and the story is done with us.”
For further reading on the revision process:
- The Art of Revision: The Last Word by Peter Ho Davies
- The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
- The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling by Charles Johnson
- The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing by Alice Laplante
- What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction by Alice McDermott
- A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life by George Saunders
- One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
- On Revision - April 20, 2026
- Should I Fictionalize My Memoir? - June 21, 2024
- Do I Need a Writing Coach? - July 13, 2023
