Revision as an act of listening

Turning down the world. Hitting the power button. Finding the inner voice.

Hello friends.

Thanks for your patience while waiting for this month’s newsletter. Last month, I had friends and family visiting Amsterdam, and anything outside of attending to them, or getting in what small amount of writing time I could, fell to the wayside.

I want to thank those of you who reached out. I’m still here, plugging away.

Speaking of which, a quick announcement: I have a new short story forthcoming in the Winter issue of Door=Jar. For those of you in the US, you’ll be able to pick up their Winter issue at Barnes and Noble or at select independent bookstores. If you’re in Europe, get in contact and I will wrangle one for you.

Also, if you missed the last newsletter, I announced that I had two flash fiction pieces appearing in the long-running indie lit mag Bull. Make sure to check those out too. These experiments in brevity have been a blast.

Now, onto this month’s rambling.

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Listening to the characters talk

A running theme, a concern lately amongst my students: what to do with revisions?

The first draft is done. The writer, at this point, has taken some chances. They’ve made choices, one small one after another, and now there’s something. What could it be?

If a first draft is a good one, it offers a set of rules for moving forward. Maybe “rules” isn’t the right word. Perhaps what I mean is that the first draft draws borders. Here are the confines in which the action might take place. Here is the map for the war of conflict.

What a writer will often find, though, is that even if these borders are written strongly, in indelible ink, what exists inside those borders is murky. Inside the borders are character archetypes, effigies, straw men, buildings made of stucco and not much else, and fields without wildlife. The possibilities of what all this could become, beyond generic renderings, are as infinite as the thoughts within the writer's head and as plentiful as the people populating the earth and the lands on which they roam.

The writer, with the first draft, has attempted to tell a story that has come to them from somewhere else. Some artists feel it is just good old imagination talking. Some feel that it’s the universe speaking through their writing. Some might call the universe the muse. Regardless, the writer is an antenna, tuned to certain waves.

When writing down such ethereal transmission, the frequency is often full of static. What comes through the channel between the universe and the earthly vessel is unclear.

Writing the first draft of anything is kind of like playing a game of telephone with inarticulate kids. A phrase here and there might be right, but often the rest is a misheard word soup.

The greater problem: we live in a world of buzz. If you believe in energy forces and auras and telepathic chatter that’s nearly 8 billion voices competing with the frequencies we are naturally attracted to, those frequencies that create art. What’s worse is that the loudest of the voices—media and news and propaganda—creates suggestions that lead to a disruption of the wave we’re naturally attuned to. This becomes what we call the voice in our heads. This is the echo of capitalism. This is the critic. What if the ideas we’ve written down were someone else’s to begin with? How do we find our true voice?

All of it, a disorienting doppler effect.

So the main task of revision is to remove distortion from hearing what is truly being messaged by the creative wave. It’s about finding our true voice inside all the buzz. What are we truly interested in? What obsesses us? Which stories matter most? And who are the people we see in our heads, creating a story that conveys those messages clearly?

I’ve come to give similar advice to my students as I whisper to myself as I write these days: Let that first draft come out with all the distortion intact. There’s no need to fight it. Don’t fret it. Because as a revisionist, you become a codebreaker. You become an engineer of sound and distortion and clarity.

There’s this common saying among writers that at some point while revising, the character’s begin to speak. I think this is true, but it misses the point. If the characters are speaking to the writer at all, the important thing is that they’re right there, listening, ready to transcribe without distraction.