How do we revise? How do we revisit what we’ve done, stay steady, see it with some clarity, and re-approach it? Time away is one answer, of course, and a necessary one at some stages. Printing it out can help, when you do return to it. Holding it in hand, seeing it on the page. Reading generously, quickly, as readers do, but with pen in hand to make notes. Imagining we are someone else reading it: how will this person react? Finally, sending it off to someone else to read, in fact, and getting that reaction–making sure this person is a loving, intelligent reader who would like your kind of book in the first place. And then we are faced with processing and integrating the notes on the manuscript—our own and others’ comments. Sometimes that is when the real challenge begins, and that is what today’s BWW blog is about.

I am teaching a year-long revision course. Each month we read one person’s entire book manuscript and have an hour’s conversation about it. We give detailed marginal and end notes. And I provide a monthly list of insights—lessons the other writers can take from the critique of this book and apply to their own work. It’s always so much easier to see all the principles of storytelling—the ones that are working and the ones that are not—in someone else’s writing than in our own.

Our brave first writer up was the wonderfully talented Lea Page, whose first book, Walk With Me: A Companion and Guide for Parents, is forthcoming from in the spring of 2015 by Floris Books in the UK.

We read Lea’s powerful and moving memoir-in-progress, Something About You. Three pieces excerpted from the memoir have been or will be published: “Preparing the House for Sale” won second prize for literary non-fiction and is published in the 2014 Seven Hills Review.  “Two Worlds” is forthcoming in the fall from Soundings Review. “Grinding Grain,” at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship: http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/grinding-grain/

Recently, after her critique, Lea sent me an email with which I so identified that I thought I’d share it all with you. It’s about revision and resistance and writing scenes. And it made me laugh.

Letter from Lea

I thought you might get a laugh out of my process these last few weeks:

The first few times I approached a section (having printed out and cut them all up into over 100 pieces), I immediately began rationalizing why I didn’t need to put them into scene.  But then I heard your voice (30,000 times) saying, yes, you have to put it in scene.  So I try an end-run by going into the study where Ray* is working and tell him that I really don’t think I can put it into scene but that you insist.  He says, well, why don’t you just try it and see how it works.  So I harrumph and sit down and lo and behold, I get a flash of inspiration and voila, a scene comes out and I am wildly happy with it…. and then I have the next one, and I rationalize why it doesn’t/can’t be put into scene.

So I am about half-way through– I’ve been working at this feverish pace, like 5 or 8 hours, till my brain just shuts down–and it is REALLY working.  Things fall into place like magic.  It is tighter — shorter even, how is that possible when I am adding scenes?– and also more open.  And way causal.**  Somehow, the scenes let me weave in so many more layers and all the little threads and crumbs totally connect.

But every time I start a section– still– I go through the whole resistance thing.  So I have totally internalized you and Ray.  I go through this whole conversation with both of you each time, so if you are worn out these last weeks, it’s because you have been kicking my ass all day.

See you Sunday.

Lea

Notes from Elizabeth:

* Lea’s husband.

** We talk a lot about causality, as in cause and effect. One thing triggering the next.

What do you resist, and how do you break through your resistance? What surprises you when you do?