Authors on revision

YWP Editor offers tips on the Art of Revision

Assorted musings, quotes and ramblings
on the Art of Revision

"I do it all the time,” says Toni Morrison of the act of revision, adding that even when she reads from books published years ago, she revises, thinking: "Oh, now I know the right word."

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon." -- Robert Cormier

"Half my life is an act of revision." -- John Irving

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." -- Richard North Patterson

"I have rewritten - often several times- every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers." -- Vladimir Nabokov

"The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug. … When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them -- then the rest will be valuable." -- Mark Twain

"This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again." -- Oscar Wilde

"I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged." -- Erica Jong
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Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway was a weird guy but a brilliant writer. His strength was in his self-editing and his ability to create fiction from his non-fiction experiences and writing; he was facile at both eliminating unnecessary words, particularly adjectives, and at adding important detail to bring his work to life. One of his most famous books, The Old Man and the Sea, was intended as a much longer work. He wrote the story as a kind of introduction but it became so wildly popular he left it and then reconciled what he had done:

“The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of the way they made their living, were born, educated, bore children etc. …I have tried to do something else….I have tried to eliminate everything necessary to conveying the experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened.”

If you haven’t read the book, read it. And it has one of the best opening sentences of any book ever: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” How can you stop reading?

Hemingway once told the Paris Review, that each day, before he started writing something new; he would revise his previous day’s work. He said that each piece of work he revised at least three more times: when the entire manuscript was finished, after a clean typescript was made and again during proofreading.

Often Hemingway added material when he revised. (This is from Robert E. Flemings: The Editing Process) More complex is Hemingway's search for the right words to define Miss Mary's obsession with the huge lion she has been hunting and to differentiate this special lion from another heard roaring the night before. His first attempt to define her attitude is muddled and awkward:

"But it was necessary to prove that [sic] to Miss Mary that he was not the lion who meant all of the things that meant so much to her that we had respected her feelings about."

Probably without removing the page from the typewriter, Hemingway cancelled the ending of this sentence from the tenth word on and rewrote the latter part:

"But it was necessary to prove that he was not the lion she had hunted for so long who was charged with many offenses and whose huge pug marks, the left hind one scarred, we had followed so many times only, finally to see him going away into tall grass that lead [sic] to the heavy timber of the swamp or to the thick brush of the gerenuk country up by the old Manyattaon the way to the Chyulu hills."

This latter sentence, overflowing with detail, not only illustrates Miss Mary's growing frustration over the thwarted chase but gives substance to the lion and documents his elusive nature.

Toni Morrison
(This is from a course outline by Lilia Melani of CityUniversity of New York)
Morrison wants her prose to recreate black speech, "to restore the language that black people spoke to its original power"; for her, language “is the thing that black people love so much – the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It's a love, a passion. Its function is like a preacher's: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen would be to lose that language.”

Her prose has the quality of speech; she deliberately strives for this effect, which she calls "aural literature." She hears her prose as she writes, and during the revision process she cuts phrasing which sounds literary or written rather than spoken.

Morrison wants readers to participate in her novels, to be involved actively. Readers are encouraged to create the novel with her and to help construct meaning. She uses the model of the black preacher who "requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or to change and to modify." … One small example of her encouraging reader participation is her not using adverbs like "softly" or "angrily" to describe characters' speeches; the reader should recognize/feel the speaker's emotion from the writing.

John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was a different kind of writer and self-editor. He was famous for cutting – he took 90,000 words out of a draft of East of Eden. His ultimate revision: In the late 1930s Steinbeck was determined to write a big, important work. He was already successful and well-known having published, among others, Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men. So he wrote the first draft of Grapes of Wrath. His publisher began promoting it. But Steinbeck didn’t like it; so, calling it a “smart-alec” work, he burned it. Then he started over.