Once More About Revising

 When I first tried writing fiction, I did not understand about revision. Law school taught me to revise, but I did not apply it to writing fiction until prison. I keep writing here about revision just so any others aspiring to writing may get the lesson now that took me 40 years to learn.

The Paris Review's Revising One Sentence by Lydia Davis is one of those essays teaching the importance of revision.

So I write it down and then immediately revise it. Today I revise this sentence immediately; sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Maybe it depends on how interested I am in what I write down, or maybe I don’t revise it if the writing is so simple or brief that it comes out exactly right the first time. Today it isn’t quite right and I must be interested because I revise it: I want it to be exactly right. I will work on it until it is exactly right, whether or not the observation is important and whether or not I think I’ll ever “use” it. In fact, I don’t often use notebook entries in a story unless the entry turns into the story (as was the case, for instance, with “Liminal: The Little Man” in Break It Down, and many others).

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There is also the constant practice I get from revising notebook entries. And it may be that what I have worked out in the final version of one notebook entry may inspire another sentence in a new story without my even realizing it. Or maybe the notebook is a place to practice not only writing but also thinking. After all, when you revise a sentence you are revising not only the words of the sentence but also the thought in the sentence. And more generally, by getting a certain description exactly right, I am sharpening my powers of observation as well as my ability to handle the language. So there are many ways to justify working hard on one sentence in a notebook, a sentence that you may never use. But most of all, as I said, I follow my impulses in writing without asking whether what I am doing is sensible, efficient, moral, et cetera. I do it because I like to or want to—which is where everything in writing should begin anyway. (As for the question of morality—I won’t publish something if it seems to me morally wrong to publish it, but the act of exploration that is writing is very different from the finality and publicness of publishing. Writing is private until it is made public.)

Read how she revised the one sentence inspiring her essay. That is eye-opening, educational.

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