Reading About Revisions While Revising

 The pain! The angst! The things I had not thought of before!

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: The Curse of Revision by Keene Short makes me feel far less alone.

To me, revision is a cursed process. I mean this in the sense that Macbeth is a cursed play, in that actors who perform it become entangled in misfortune along the way. Writing a first draft can be pleasant under ideal circumstances, and at least feels rewarding once the draft is finished. Revision, on the other hand, involves unpacking, rearranging, deleting, adding, researching, shifting, rethinking, evaluating, comparing, questioning. It involves setbacks and wrong turns and lost threads. The first draft is a treasure map while every subsequent draft is a labyrinth whose Minotaur keeps getting published in all your favorite journal

Yes! Yes!

Paragraph by paragraph: I don’t have much of a revision process other than that simple, repetitive task. Perhaps revision is so difficult for me because it’s the most normie part of the writing process, by which I mean the most like an actual day-job. At least, my own day jobs are cursed with monotony more than ill-fortune. I have cleaned toilets at a state park, prepared vegetables, cooked the same recipes, checked in stacks and stacks of library books, shaped dough for 140 pizzas daily. Every task is a paragraph, and while I spent every hour of those jobs praying for something extraordinary to break the monotony, all I could do was perfect the process one task at a time, revising the process of cleaning, sorting, mixing, and shaping. I found pleasure in the routine through tiny adjustments, through refinement in my timing and precision and speed.

And I have this thing where ideas pop out when I am on the bus, at work, but always away from the computer. The kind of ideas that make me wonder why I did not see or think this before now. 

The essay ends on an upbeat note that I wish I felt, I am never sure if I am done.

sch 6/18