By Alexandra Watson
Two thesis advisors, two thesis readers, a literary agent, several friends and colleagues all gave me one consistent piece of advice: one character in my manuscript, a novel-in-progress about an epidemic of insomnia, stood out as more fully realized and compelling than the rest.
I had an intriguing female character—a not-quite-recovering addict and bartender who becomes an unlikely heroine during a crisis—shouldn’t I welcome this feedback? Yet I hadn’t intended for Leila to be the protagonist, hadn’t given her any more weight (or page count) than the other characters I alternated between. Only recently, after rereading the entire manuscript over the course of a few days, did I finally succumb to what my readers had identified so quickly.
So why has it taken me three years of hearing this feedback to accept it? And more importantly, how will I face the daunting task of revising 300+ pages of prose to make it more centered around one character?
While we may admit that higher order concerns are most important in revision, actually addressing these concerns requires major rethinking, re-planning, and reworking. They’re the concerns that remind us of how frustratingly inefficient writing can be, and why, in extreme cases, we abandon projects altogether. When readers point out higher order concerns, we resist them as a defense mechanism, partially because we feel attached to the original, and partially because we don’t want to do all that work.
But this is the type of laziness that backfires—like half-assing a chore and later spending more time fixing it than if you had done it right the first time. Of course, the chore metaphor doesn’t work perfectly: sometimes it takes writing an entire draft, or even multiple drafts to even identify what the main idea is.
Readers, however, seem to identify compelling ideas more quickly. But identifying a higher order concern and communicating it in a way that encourages a writer to address it is a different story. I can’t say that I’ve mastered the latter, but I’m learning some strategies and principles—through my revision of my own work and my work with students and other writers:
- Start with the whole. When possible, read the whole piece in one go before making any notes. Highlight places to return to, but try to get a feeling for the whole;
- Find the key parts. After identifying a higher order concern—let’s say that an essay lacks a clear focus or argument—identify some key moments that exemplify this problem—maybe the introduction and topic sentences. Use those moments to guide the revision process. Now the writer is not focused on how overwhelming the complete revision will be, but on these specific parts she can work on;
- Use the parts to reinforce your (and the writer’s) understanding of the whole. As each small revision is made, return to a discussion of the whole, to see if it has shifted or come more clearly into focus;
- Extend your empathy. It can be frustrating when a writer doesn’t recognize a higher order concern as such. But I think a lot of that resistance comes out of that defense mechanism I mentioned earlier. And even though my half-finished chore metaphor doesn’t grant the writer a lot of sympathy, it should at least feel familiar to us. A writer may not need to hear that the revision work she has to do is easy, but she does want to think of it as Breaking it down into specific tasks can help with this;
- Find the gems. Early drafts from writers at all levels can resemble piles of rubble, but there are almost always moments of insight and analysis to be found. Treat revision as polishing the gems rather than clearing the rubble. When the gems start to emerge, the rubble will fall into place where they belong—among the lower order concerns.
Published April 6, 2016
