how i be revising

plus muscle man!

Hello friends—

First, I will be discussing Jordan Castro’s very brilliant Muscle Man on September 11 at Rizzoli Bookstore. The book is simply fantastic—a Bernhardian romp, in fact. It’s about a professor (young and fit, not old and adulterous) who is stuck at a faculty meeting when all he wants to be doing is lifting weights at the gym. It is the first book I have ever read and enjoyed that is also about getting gym-pilled by Instagram memes, lol. I cannot say enough good things about this book. Come out and support an indie author and also see a beautiful bookstore.

This post is very late. I spent the second half of July and all of August playing tennis, and then I spent the last two weeks in a panic trying to prepare for the start of the semester. This term, I am teaching a workshop for undergraduates and a craft seminar in fiction for graduate students. The topic of the craft seminar is ideology, specifically the ideological basis of fiction. So while I was playing tennis in August, I was reading books and articles on the subject. I spent a lot of time sitting on the deck at Sutton East or in the inter-court waiting area at Roosevelt Island, reading Althusser and Pierre Macherey (who is a new favorite of mine, he’s so good).

I also started reading The Master and Margarita, which a student recommended to me at the end of last semester. He bought a copy of the book and gave it to me when we met for coffee at the end of the term. I often take reading recommendations from my students. Not because the books are new to me or sound super interesting, but because I am genuinely moved when one of them recommends something to me. And honestly, they’re usually right. The experience they promise when they recommend it…is usually the exact experience I have when I read it, so I think I’ll keep reading things on their recommendation. When I posted about The Master and Margarita, and reading it on the recommendation of a student, people projected many different things onto what was, to my mind, a very innocuous and clear statement. And I became a subject of discourse. But such is the danger of existing on the internet.

However, we are here to talk about revision and revision strategies.

Now, when some people hear the word “revision,” what they imagine is something much closer to editing. I have a friend currently studying creative writing, and he has this habit of talking about his revisions as “edits.” As in, “I have these edits to do” or “I’m working on these edits,” or “This story needs some edits.” Sometimes I say to him, “Well, you don’t need edits. You need revisions.” An edit is often a matter of correcting errors or mistakes. A repeated word. An inaccuracy. A mistake in chronology. Using the wrong character name in a scene. Refining language in a description. Making usage consistent throughout. Making sure that the conventions established earlier in the piece are obeyed for the whole time. These sorts of things are edits. These site-specific or targeted interventions that seek to bring the piece into alignment with its established rules of engagement and order. These are edits.

Revision unfolds on a higher plane, so to speak. Revision entails things like removing or adding a character. Removing or adding a plotline. Altering pacing of the story. Changing a setting. Changing the stakes. Altering the point-of-view or perspective. Altering the tense. Changing or better establishing the emotional and dramatic questions of the piece. Changing the structure or the mode of telling. Bringing in different formal and genre elements. These are revisions.

Revision entails a change in the rule of law of a given piece. An edit is how that change is made manifest. You edit a piece when you feel that the rule of law is good and sound and established, and when what you want is to better articulate that law and to remove inaccuracies and faults of judgement. Things that get in the way of telling the story precisely how you want to tell it. You revise a piece when you find some fault or issue in that governing law or vision of the story.

Revision always makes use of edits. But not all edits are revisions.

You might ask, well, then what about when someone (an editor) does an edit of your work that creates significant changes? Are those not revisions?

My hot take is: No. Because no one else can revise your work for you. Other people may read your work. They may edit your work. But they cannot revise your work for you. Those edits may lead to revision (and often, hopefully, they do) but they are not themselves revisions.

Let me explain it a little better. Edits can lead to revision when they reveal to the author some fault or flaw in the governing logic of their work as presented. Sometimes, the editor will ask questions that unmake the piece right before the author’s very eyes. In this instance, a revision will result. But only when the author of the piece undertakes to perform the revision. The edits themselves do not constitute the revision. The edits are just clues that there is some issue, some deeper kink in logic and form and structure and perhaps even style, that is keeping the story at issue from being expressed fully and clearly. While good edits may hint at a better, idealized form of the story that exists somewhere outside of the piece as currently presented, that form is external to the piece as written and must be brought into being through revision. So, no, your editor cannot revise you. Only you can revise you. Your editor edits you, yes, and those edits do sometimes lead to revision.

So, how do you revise? If you have read my piece on feedback, some of this will be familiar.

1. You gotta read the thing
   It can be scary. I’m not too proud to say that I really hate reading my own work. Sometimes, when an editor sends me back notes I have been eagerly awaiting, I feel such sharp disgust that I cannot even bear to open the file until I absolutely must because of the fear of missed deadlines. I absolutely hate looking at my own words. This creates a complication for the process of revision, obviously. But the short of it is that…you kind of just have to get over it. I’m sorry, there’s no shortcut. You simply have to get over it. Strike whatever dark bargains with whatever gods rule your universe that you must, but you simply have to just open the file and look at the words. Sorry. That part is pretty non-negotiable.

   
   Having mustered your courage to look at your document, the next step is pretty simple: read your piece. The whole thing. Read it all the way through. Whenever you feel a strong urge to make a correction or you feel an intense emotion of disgust or revulsion, make a note of where it is, but do not let yourself change anything.
   

2. You gotta see the thing

   Make an outline of the skeleton of the piece. I mean, super schematic. It’s important that you do this based on what is actually on the page. Not what you imagine. Not what you interpret. But what you have actually written. What have you actually written. What would a person working from your document say is the skeleton of your piece. They don’t have access to your vast amounts of research. They were not with you while you were writing it. What did you actually, literally say on the page. Turn that into an outline.
   
   Maybe it looks like ACT 1, ACT 2, ACT 3. Or maybe it looks like a beat sheet from screenwriting. Maybe it looks like the old school essay diagrams we used to write in school. I don’t care what it looks like. However you can best represent the structure of your piece to yourself, that is what you should do. It’s just important that you be able to visualize the structure of your story. It can include only the major details and turning points. Or you can do one for the plot journey and one for the emotional journey. For essayists, maybe you lay out the argument and then you lay out the narrative aspect you want to weave in throughout. For poets, maybe you look at stanzas, or couplets, whatever. Just find a way to represent the structure of your piece to yourself in some form or fashion. And to work primarily from your text itself, not from your wishful imagining of what that text is.

3. You gotta observe the thing

   Once you have read the piece, make a list of things that you think you would like to change. These can be big or small. Structural or thematic. Whatever. Just make a list of things that you want to change. Not things you hate. Or things you love. Or things you think make you a shit writer. None of that. Just a list of changes that present themselves after having read the piece once.

   Do any of the places you felt particularly compelled to intervene and change align with any of the general categories you’ve just established. See if you can group your spikes of disgust with particular changes you’ve listed out. Do those changes you’ve listed work toward fixing that spike of disgust? And if so, how do you think it will improve that particular issue?

4. You gotta map the thing

   How you go about this depends on you. But what I would say is find some way to map the changes you listed onto the outline you made. Do they cluster? Are they scattered throughout? Are there particular sites of density? This isn’t necessarily to say that places with a lot of potential changes are weak. This is only an indication of places in the piece that make you feel incredibly insecure. And maybe it’s the case that you need to make some changes there. But it’s important not to just jump in and start deleting and hacking away because it could also be the case that that place about which you feel most insecure is the one part of piece that is the strongest or most alive and everything else needs to be built around it. Mapping your desired changes onto the outline of the story just provides useful data about how you’re feeling about various parts of the story. That’s all.
   

5. You gotta understand the thing

   When you have made the list, do you notice any overlaps that point to big picture things like characterization or the handling of time or structure? Do any of the changes point to a lack of clarity? Or an overall lack of interiority? Or does your list point toward issues of pacing and tension? Try to group your changes under general headings of things like CHARACTERIZATION, PLOT, STRUCTURE, PACING, STYLE, MOOD, etc.
   
   What I mean is look for the note under the note, the issue under the desired change. The goal here is to understand why you feel motivated to make a particular change and what your desired outcome is. Maybe it is the case that the characterization of this character is weak at this particular moment, or maybe it’s the case that you don’t need the character at all. Are there deeper questions at work here?
   

6. You gotta do the thing

   From your various lists, generate a set of action items. If you noticed many of your desired changes having to do with pacing, then create a set of action items about pacing. This can look like: “Improve pacing of first act.” This will generate its own set of action items. Maybe through your list-making, you found out that it felt like you took too long to establish the stakes or articulate the question of the piece. So, your action items might look like this:

   1. Improve Pacing of First Act

      1. Make first scene more active

         1. Reduce exposition

         2. Introduce tension via action and dialogue

         3. Establish character stakes earlier

         4. Remove unnecessary secondary characters to create room

         5. Tighten description for rhythm and clarity

   It’s going to look different for different people, but the idea is to create a set of action items. You don’t need to list out EVERYTHING you want to do under each action item. In fact, sometimes it’s better if you don’t. We simply want a set of actionable items.

7. Now, you gotta revise the thing

   Things are getting tautological. But, now you are actually ready to revise. Pick an action item. Like, improve pacing of first act. Or Fix Plot (lol, this is one i rely on a lot). Whatever. Just pick one. Then, reread the piece. with that action item in mind, making targeted, concrete choices. Do not worry, you are not wed to these choices. It’s just important that you begin to make them. These changes will of course lead to other changes that lead to other changes and beyond, but the important part is that you are now…revising.

Okay, so now what? Well, you finish this particular revision. And you pick a different action item. And when you finish that, you pick another. But also, the process should be organic. The changes should begin to present themselves to you as you undertake the process. Let yourself be drawn along. Try not to get too bogged down in style stuff if you’re working out structure stuff unless a connection presents itself to you. Try not to be too bogged down by structure stuff if you’re working on style stuff…unless a connection presents itself to you. The goal of this approach is to selectively shrink the whole structure of the piece down into manageable frames that get expanded as you work. The goal is to prevent you from being overwhelmed by the totality of the thing by providing you with specific targets of intervention. And from there, you build your way out in the same way you built your way out as you wrote the thing in the first place.

Often, revision goes haywire when people try to do everything all at once. They try to revise the whole piece when they didn’t write the thing as a whole at first. You wrote it step by step, didn’t you? Moment to moment, scene to scene. Even if you had an outline, you carefully layered up the story or the essay or the poem. It came to you in pieces that you assembled to make So why should revision be different? But it does seem like revision should be different, right? Because you have the whole thing in front of you, so it’s hard to remember how it used to exist, as pieces and threads you wove together. With this method, we’re kind of shortcutting our way back to that earlier understanding of the piece. Going in, paying attention to just one aspect, which will organically, usually, lead you to the next.

This is the method of revision I tell my students. Just as a schematic. Read the thing. Make an outline of what you actually said. Map the changes you think you want to make onto it. Take some time to understand why you want to make those particular changes. Make a list of action items. And then make your way through, layer at a time, doing them. Usually, the thing takes care of itself. And it results in a new draft, a new revision.

Then you do it over again. The process will usually go quicker and quicker because you will want to make fewer changes. Sometimes, it goes slow then fast, sometimes fast then slow as you uncover deeper issues you never knew you had.

Let me give you an example from my own life.

I have a book coming out in October called Minor Black Figures. I started writing the book in a hotel in Paris in 2023. The novel concerns a painter in New York named Wyeth, who spends all summer fucking a Jesuit (reformed). My agent and editor liked the first opening of the novel:

That summer in New York, the painting wasn’t going well.

Wyeth was down in the village after a mediocre group show featuring some youngish careerist painters who had formed a collective, MangoWave, so called because they were interested in the Southeast Asian diasporic visual idiom. Their work was derivative of the postwar grotesquerie one saw in Lucien Freud, Celia Paul, Alice Neel, but then something horrible had happened to painting. What had begun, Wyeth thought, as a sincere attempt to exteriorize the spiritual and social collapse of modernity had become instead a less sincere attempt at exteriorizing the vague colonial condition. Trauma painting, but whose trauma?

After the show, he stood outside of a bar smoking, thinking about the bad choices he had made. He watched a rat drag a smaller rat over a mound of garbage. The smaller rat had a wound in its belly that continually leaked abdominal contents over the steeping trash, but the larger rat wasn’t deterred and the two slipped disappeared under a moldy cereal box. Across the street, some people from MangoWave and their immediate hangers-on were having dinner at an outdoor table. The bistro was only moderately overpriced and self-consciously low-scale, which was to say it was the sort of place where you did ketamine in the bathroom instead of coke. Occasionally, Wyeth heard a braying laugh from the table. In the bar behind him, dad rock and shouted conversations. A little further down the sidewalk, the other smoking refugees from inside. People stepping into the narrow street to avoid the plumes of smoke. Bikes zipping by, their angry red lights glinting. At the intersection up the street, the whoosh of evening traffic with its bleating horns, the wail of sirens. Another night was passing over the West Village: the high cliffs of the brownstones with their elegant stoops, popped balloons hanging from railings, discarded mattresses soaked through with rain and piss, the mounds of dog shit resting on the rim of feeder boxes, and tall windows glazed gold with light through sheer curtains.

I mean, it’s very Edith Wharton (I was rereading The Age of Innocence at the time), but it’s also very much the way that my earlier books opened. It’s very much a modern opening of a certain kind of realist novel written by millennials and their descendants. In-scene, zingy, exposition floating overhead in a kind of bitchy tone. The social totality emerges only via sly allusions to social data. Ketamine. Trauma. A very impressionistic painting of the non-Protagonist social agents. The bikers don’t faces, for example. Neither do these people from MangoWave. It is a book that posits that the center of the universe is this disaffected young man, and that everyone else is a secondary. And that may be true in novels, sometimes, but not in the kinds of novels I love, which are novels that ultimately give a sense of life as it unfolds in a society with other people who…have faces. I was unhappy with this not as a passage of writing, but as the opening of a novel because it seemed to open on such small terms and to have such a meager spirit about it. I wanted to write about a man who lived in the world and had to deal with the wages of the world. So I revised this opening like seven, eight, nine, ten, fifteen times, something insane like that.

Each revision brought me a little closer to what I was after, culminating in what is the new opening of the book:

That summer, they threw bombs and made signs for peace.

They went into the streets and the parks and the squares, the same as they had done two years before, and three years before that, and six years before that, and three years before that, which of course meant that they had never really left the streets and the parks and the squares in the first place.

There was a president in Washington and nine Supreme Court justices.There was a war in Europe. There was not yet a war in America because America fought its wars elsewhere. On the news, they spoke of complications and complexities. They spoke of gas prices and networks of risk. They spoke of supply chains and the specter of scarcity.

It was not an extraordinary year in a remarkable time. Disgusted, not surprised was the slogan of their era.

Still, they went into the streets and the parks and the squares. They lifted their signs. They shouted. They marched. They organized. They sued. They settled. Some wondered if the streets and the parks and the squares were themselves merely other settings for the unfolding of a vast play. But was this cynicism not merely an excuse for a lack of resolve?They had to believe in the possibility of change. The very possibility of freedom was freedom itself. So, they went into the streets and the parks and the squares. They smoked outside bars. They argued over what tomorrow might bring. The lesser among them, the timorous, the doubtful, and the wavering, stood back, watching, waiting for some greater sign, savoring their doubts.

It was a hollow time. It was a dull time. It was summer, and Manhattan steamed between two rivers.

These are very different, obviously. One opens on personal engagement. The other opens at a more global level. There is a trick to the second opening that I won’t give away (you’ll have to read the book) but it comes in the paragraph immediately following the end of the excerpt. My agent and editor…felt that the new opening was rather slow. That it began perhaps too globally. That they wanted to get to character immediately, and I thought, you know what, a book is not a movie, and readers should have to read it. And that it shouldn’t feel like a risk to wait until the second page of a book to get to a character if what we are immersed in is the world the character is also immersed in. Why do people feel such anxiety about not getting a character on page one. Why does that freak them out so much? Anyway, I heard them out. I heard their concerns. But the reader was simply going to have to read the book. And they were going to have to meet what awaits all of us when we step outside of the door, a reminder that the world has no protagonists, only people engaged always in a network of complicated relations. Though, Althusser is whispering on my shoudler and reminding me that these are not people but…subjects. Anyway. I wanted to start at scale. But I didn’t realize that I wanted that. I only felt that the opening I wrote before was wrong somehow.

How then did I get to the new version? There is a world in which I could have simply polished the first opening, made it perfect and sing, and it still would have failed to do the thing that I wanted it to do, which was change the rules of social engagement in my art. Editing wasn’t sufficient. I needed a revision. First, I had to figure out why the opening bothered me. What was that feeling of discomfort whenever I looked at it? Again, it’s a fine passage of writing with some odd things about it (I literally copied it out of the first draft file, leave me alone), but not a bad opening for a novel. Yet, I didn’t want to write a novel. I wanted to write this novel. A novel capable of admitting the large as well as the small into itself. I needed that kind of Dickensian sweep in order to set the outer bound for the book, rather than starting in scene as I always do. When I realized that the issue I was having was that the opening of the book was setting the scale wrong, I set about trying to find a shape that would establish the scale I was after. I went to Dickens. To Tolstoy. To Zola, who is really the master of this sort of thing. To remind myself of the novel’s ability to, occasionally, speak with the voice of the world. Even if filtered.

In other words, I noted my discomfort, I observed my discomfort, I came to understand the nature of that discomfort, and then I made an action item. To the fix opening, I wanted a grander scale. Then I started writing different versions of that until it felt right. Then it was polishing. Lots and lots and lots of polishing.

This is the process for all of my revisions. Read. Note. Observe. Analyze to understand the deeper issue. Then action item.

But I thought I might also leave you with some practical tidbits:

1. I print out my drafts and retype them by hand after I’ve made a significant round of revisions. For novels, I do it chapter by chapter. Each time I revise a chapter, I retype it. It keeps you in touch with the text. Every word passes by your eyeballs as you retype, and you’re able to catch inconsistencies this way. Some people save the re-type for really big overhauls. Like, they do it once or twice for a project. Either way, it can be a helpful way to get at things you’ve been glossing over.

2. Reading the work out loud either by yourself or using voice to text. I used voice to text to listen to my novel a lot so that I could flag places where I was bored or confused or where the writing was bad. I also reread whatever I’ve worked on at the end of each session. Sometimes, I print out individual paragraphs and read those for flow, rhythm, and language.

3. Time is your friend. Setting a work aside for a period of time is useful because you sometimes need to forget the piece so that you can encounter it anew. This prevents you from glossing over things.

4. Some people “revise” as they go. These people are not revising. They are editing. I’m sorry, it’s just the case! But if you are “revising” as you go, you should still probably, at the very end, reread the thing just to make sure all of your “revisions” have resulted in a coherent (or purposefully incoherent) work.

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Also. Please preorder Minor Black Figures. It comes out October 14!