Tearful Revisions

I cried when I reread the draft of chapter two. More than once. Four times, maybe five. Tears and full on sobbing, sitting on my bed with the paper in my lap next to the computer. I don’t wish that experience on anyone, but actually I do recommend it.

This last December I printed out my manuscript and read it front to back. I didn’t write it in order. I wrote, I don’t know, let’s say chapter three, then four, then one, then six, then five, then two. I know for sure I wrote two last, when I was really tired, and I wrote it faster than any other chapter. Then I wrote the introduction and conclusion, sent the whole heap off to readers, and moved on to the paid work that demanded my time. I wouldn’t call that an ideal arrangement, but then I never work in ideal conditions. Anyway, this means that in December my read through was the first time I read the manuscript like a reader, in the order of presentation, distinct from the order in which I wrote it.

I had a medium-sized window of spare time because my family went to visit some relatives. Of course I missed my family but their absence also opened up some space in my head, providing a less distraction-rich environment. I wanted to make the most of that, so I combined reading the printed copy of the manuscript with my computer’s text-to-speech function. Set at the fastest speed, the computer talks at about the pace I read on paper. Having the computer talk at me was sort of like tying my legs to the chair. Sometimes when I’m working and the work isn’t fun anymore - the work that takes discipline and willpower, the work that takes from me rather than excites me - I will lose focus and work inefficiently - get another cup of tea, stare out the window, etc. When that happens I still feel like I’m working but I’m working really badly, for more time. There’s no gain to working like that, except that it’s comfortable, in a lazy kind of way. Listening to the computer read while I read along with the paper ups my efficiency greatly because it means the time that feels like work is time when I actually work.

I got through the intro and chapter one fast, maybe in two hours, tops. I took a break between each, shifting to some writing (I’ll get back to that), then did some actual recreational activity, and some snacking. Chapter two took about an hour, and like I said I totally burst into tears several times. At first this worried me, but I swallowed that worry and kept going. I told myself that yes, it hurt to work on chapter two but it wouldn’t hurt less if I worked slower, it would just prolong the agony. So I kept going. Then I took a break, worked more, break, work, and so on. Chapter two was the most painful part. This makes sense, because it was the roughest chapter in ideas, in prose, in organization, and, because of my lack of clarity in writing it, it was the longest chapter.

Afterward, I thought more about my reaction. I cried for a few reasons. The chapter read like really bad writing and it felt impossible to revise. I felt bored and stressed while reading it. All I wanted to do was anything else: I wanted so badly to procrastinate on chapter two. If I had worked on that chapter in the way I felt inclined to work, it could have easily taken me a week just to read it. I know this from the sad reality of past experiences with trying to get work done. I basically boiled down the unpleasantness into a concentrate, and took it really fast. So all that week’s worth of discomfort came in an hour, and I reacted to it. But this wasn’t really a problem. I was in a private place where I could cry without any repercussions, and it didn’t really mean anything. It just meant I was uncomfortable, deeply so. And, I’m pleased to say, I stomped the fuck out of that discomfort.

I mentioned that I took breaks between chapters, and that I wrote some after listening to each chapter. Here’s what I did. I want to share this because my own work really turned a corner when I started doing this.

Before I even read the thing I did a freewrite. I set a time for five minutes, because I wanted to write at least five minutes and because I can always make myself write for five minutes. That feeling of feasibility helps me to get moving. I’m not doing a big thing, I’m just writing for almost no time at all. In the freewrite I answered the question “what is this work about?” All I could remember was the big picture, so that helped. I wrote about the forest rather than the trees, so to speak. As I read each part of the manuscript, I occasionally scribbled specific notes on paper - fix this, reference that, draw out this theme - but mostly I just read. I also made a point not to stop listening and reading unless the idea I was having was really, really important. This meant I didn’t stop to fix any problems either. At most I identified issues to get back to. That helped me keep going. Anyway, after each part I did another freewrite: what’s this part about? how does it connect with what the work is about as a whole? Again that was about five minutes per freewrite. When I finished reading the whole manuscript I did another freewrite about what the work is about.

Next I put on a movie and opened up my chapter files. I’m going to rewrite my introduction last, s0 set that aside. While watching a movie in a small window, I numbered every paragraph in my draft, with an asterisk in front of the number. I numbered them sequentially within the chapters, not sequentially in the whole work. That is, there’s a paragraph *1 in every chapter. That took a while. Then I went back to chapter one. I did another short freewrite and I started reading again. This re-read was a reverse outline. My goal with the reverse outline is to figure out what I’ve actually said. Reverse outlining is the reason for numbering my paragraphs. I read paragraph *1 and wrote a bracketed phrase after the number, which summarized the paragraph very, very briefly. Like this: *1 [intro, opening vignette]. Then I copied the asterisked number and bracketed summary into another file. I did this for every paragraph. This was a bit dull, but not hard. All I was doing was reading one paragraph and summarizing it. That’s easy, even if it gets boring to do this 50 or 60 times per chapter.

I did another five minute freewrite about what the chapter is about in the big picture, took a break, then focused on the file with just the list of bulletpoints. I talked out loud, giving a spoken summary of the chapter, based solely on the bullet pointed notes. This is a diagnostic exercise. I can give a good summary using the notes and my memory, as long as what I’m summarizing actually makes sense. Every time there was a structural problem in the chapter, I stumbled while speaking. I tripped over the places where I made logical leaps, repeated something I had already said, and so on. I didn’t try to fix any of this at that point, I just wrote down the number of the paragraphs where I stumbled. When I was done I went back to the places where I stumbled, and cut those paragraphs out of the chapter and made a new list of bullet points reflecting the cuts. I read that again and made some decisions about where to move the cut paragraphs to eliminate most of the structural problems - most of the stumblepoints ended up being paragraphs that needed to go somewhere else in the chapter, a few needed to go in the introduction or in other chapters.

By this point I had made another revision of the chapter, by changing some elements in the structure. From here I turned to the intro. I got out the intro, conclusion, and my freewrites, and wrote a brand new intro. Mostly I just cut material from the old intro, conclusion, and freewrites, but I cut them into a new file with new prose guiding my choices. I finished the intro to chapter one in about 15 minutes, and it’s much better. Then I read through the chapter again, with my intro open in another window. On this readthrough I read and wrote for connections to the main point of the chapter. I got to the end, revised the conclusion, and called it done.

Here’s why this works well for me. For one thing, this process means I’m only ever doing one thing at a time. In the freewrites I’m brainstorming about the big picture, the forest not the trees. When I write my reverse outline, I’m reading one paragraph and summarizing it (and doing this over and over). When I read my reverse outline, I’m looking for places in the structure of the chapter that I’m going to return to. When I move things around, I return to those places and make decisions about where they go. Then I move them. Along the way as I do all this, I often have ideas (I think as a result of spending more time with my work and as a result of the crushing boredom of this process… working despite boredom is uncomfortable, but it can be productive too, because it stimulates parts of my brain to work creatively as a sort of protest against the boredom of the main task I’m focusing on). Doing short freewrites repeatedly allows me to capture those ideas, and it allows me to make those ideas wait a moment until my next freewrite, so I don’t have to drop my current task and jot down every idea that comes to me (unless it seems like a really great ideas with a lot to it, then I will sometimes change tasks and switch to writing that idea down). Revising the intro is a short and focused task with some resources - my old intro and conclusion and freewrites. I’m just writing a few paragraphs, very do-able. When I read back through, I’m writing a sentence here and there, and very occasionally a new paragraph, and I’m marching through the body of the chapter so it’s easy to see progress. Then when I write the conclusion this too is a short finite task.

This approach also means I’m only ever doing one kind of writing and thinking at a time, and I go in a hierarchy from most fundamental to least. So in the freewrites I focus on the core themes of what I’m doing. In the reverse outlining I focus on the order and structure of the chapter as a whole - are the sections in order, and are the paragraphs in order? In the readthrough I focus on paragraphs themselves, are they internally logical, do they connect to the overall theme? I often get into sentence-level edits here too but only tangentially, in that I may think of another way to phrase a point or I may write a new sentence, but I don’t generally focus on that. I plan to eventually do another pass for this kind of focus on the sentences themselves, sentence-level editing, but not for the time being. The other benefit to working this way is that it makes me more comfortable with my process of writing initial drafts. I don’t outline when I write, generally. I usually don’t know what I want to say until I’ve said most of it. So I wrote drafty, sprawling, messy drafts. Usually in my drafts I say everything or almost everything I want to say. I just say it in the wrong order and clumsily. A friend of mine has a similar process, he describes this as “getting it wrong as fast as possible.” I’ve also heard this described as writing a shitty draft or a zero draft, which becomes a first draft through some revisions. For a long time I thought that I was doing something wrong because my drafts are such a mess, but now I see that this is just how I work. I write drafts quickly, and the fast the better, really, and the drafts need tons of work. In revisions I go back to them and do that work, after I’ve said everything I want to say. I should also say, sometimes while I’m revising I realize I have more to say and so I put revising on hold and write more draft. I try to do my revising mostly when I’ve said basically everything I need to say, and the issue is re-organizing it and making it presentable, but sometimes the only way to know if there’s more to say or not is to try and revise.

There are times when I feel like I won’t be able to go from draft to revision, and times when I genuinely hate the draft and so it’s hard to be motivated to do the revisions on something so bad. It’s hard to make myself spit-shine shit. But the key is to keep going. Stopping is a recipe for not writing. Writing requires activity, and inactivity isn’t conducive to that. (I’m for taking breaks and relaxing, I’m just saying that the various bad feelings that lead to stopping writing are the enemy of writing, regardless of how they appear - self doubt, anger, self congratulation, whatever.) The fear and boredom and whatnot are part of what makes writing and revising uncomfortable. For me anyway this is just what writing is like. Writing and revising can occasionally be fun but mostly it’s like sprinting up a big hill: it hurts. The difference is that you can genuinely injure yourself by sprinting too hard, too fast, too much, but you can’t hurt yourself the same way with writing. And so, at least for me, the point is not to get away from those bad feelings but instead to manage how I respond to them. Another metaphor I use to think about this is rock climbing. I love rock climbing and I’m really, really scared of heights. I thought that climbing would end my phobia, but it hasn’t. Instead it’s helped me learn to act despite that fear, to become more brave in the face of my fear of heights. That’s become a big part of why I climb, because it’s gratifying to master a fear. (And at this point part of why I like it is because of the adrenaline rush tied to the fear. It’s also just really fun to climb.) I’m getting to the same point with writing, that writing is in part about mastering fear and acting despite discomfort. When I cried while working on chapter two I was having the emotional equivalent of the pain of sprinting until the point of almost throwing up, I took all the fear and boredom and frustration and felt it really fast. I wrote through that, which I’m proud of. Part of point of the revision method I use is that it’s a clear set of tasks that I can remember even when I’m really afraid or upset about how the writing feels. Every step is something I can actually act on, which means I can do it even when my mind is ringing with frustration and anxiety. I find that my ability to do what I think of as higher or more executive mental functions, like planning and decision-making and goal-setting, degrade heavily in the face of distraction or fatigue. They also degrade with use: I get tired, I make worse decisions, and the more decisions I made, the more I get tired of making decisions. By having a revision process with less decisions and a clear routine, I extend how much and when I can work. Even if I’m anxious, I can work anyway, and for me work is the best cure for work anxiety.