So as I mentioned here a while ago, 'tis the season of
revisions, here in Nesbetland; I have been whipping my middle-grade spy-vs-spy
novel set in East Berlin, Cloud &
Wallfish, into better and better shape. Remember the 17-page editorial
letter I got from the very insightful Kaylan Adair at Candlewick? That revision!
With the aid of my trusty revision notebook (pictured here),
in which I outlined the existing version on the left-hand pages and added
revision-letter questions, fixes, ideas and descriptions of new stuff on the
right-hand pages, I worked through the list, and then added to the list and did
it all again, and and and . . .
. . . and what you have to understand is that the past
couple of weeks have been extraordinarily busy ones, even without taking
revisions into account. Three other very
different tasks have also been demanding my time and attention, and it
occurs to me that each of these activities reminds me of revision, in one way
or another. So let's explore some revision similes today!
1. Revising is like .
. . correcting papers.
It's the end of the semester, so I have been grading papers
and exams. Lots and lots and lots of papers and exams. Here are some of the 55 final papers I have to
correct (over on the other table: a great big pile of final exams).
When I read student papers, I can't help but
think like an editor. What that means, essentially, is that I read students'
work as if they were going to write another draft sometime soon. Most of the time, of course, that isn't the case. It's the end of the semester, not the beginning! But I can't help it: I want that mythical future draft to be wonderful, and I feel as though if I could only figure out exactly what questions to ask, I could help that mythical future draft come to life. So that's how correcting papers and revision are alike, apart from the obvious red-pen similarities: they both tear apart an existing work in order to create something new in the (possible) future.
2. Revising is like .
. . cooking.
This time of year we have guests over reasonably often,
guests who really want to be fed. Just the other day, I tried a recipe I'd
never tried before: braised chicken thighs with green olives and preserved
lemon. Oh, my! It was delicious! But while I was cooking, I kept thinking about how
oddly like revisions cooking can be.
When you cook something for the first time, you have to do
quite a bit of planning. Just to
start with, you have to make lists of ingredients. (Similarly, I had to turn
the editor's long letter into a list,
in order to be able to begin to work with those comments.) You thought you
already had ground ginger in the spice cupboard, but it turns out you have
three bottles of ground cardamom, and no
ginger, so off you go to the supermarket at the last minute. (In the
revision notebook, the lists of comments and questions demand answers; sometimes
an explanation you THOUGHT you had all worked out turns out still to be lacking something--so off you go to hunt that missing ingredient down.)
But once you have all the ingredients, even the ground ginger and that pesky
expensive saffron, you can follow the recipe, and miraculously something
delicious appears. (That's the point in revisions when you start shifting the
"fixes" on the right-hand pages in the revision notebook into the
actual manuscript file.) Yes, revising can be like cooking; with luck, the end result will make a very tasty story.
3. Revising is like .
. . conducting.
Didn't see that one coming, did you? But I did something
yesterday that I've never done before: I conducted a symphony orchestra. Just
for one piece--Manuel de Falla's "Ritual Fire Dance"--but it was a
thrill, and a lot of work, and . . . it reminded me of revisions!
Before you perform, you have to rehearse. You rehearse and
rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. Lots of that rehearsing is done by you
alone, in front of a mirror.
But every time you rehearse with the actual orchestra, something new goes wrong or doesn't quite work. And then you have to figure out how to fix it! I spent a lot of
time over the last few weeks worrying about how to cue the clarinet and the
violas at the same time when I only have two hands and they sit in very
different parts of the orchestra. Or how to get the tempo moving when everyone
comes in together. Or how to explain what the ticking pizzicato should sound like, beneath
the flute solo. Or how to get the quiet places really, really quiet, so that
when the brass comes in, it's like an explosion!
The part of my brain that spent all these weeks thinking obsessively about what I would do differently at the next rehearsal--is pretty much exactly the same part of my brain that picks apart plotting and pacing. Problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. I'll be at the supermarket, shopping for ground ginger, and suddenly I've got it! I know what has to happen in Chapter 17!
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| The Lonely Practice Mirror |
The part of my brain that spent all these weeks thinking obsessively about what I would do differently at the next rehearsal--is pretty much exactly the same part of my brain that picks apart plotting and pacing. Problem solving, problem solving, problem solving. I'll be at the supermarket, shopping for ground ginger, and suddenly I've got it! I know what has to happen in Chapter 17!
The end result of all this thinking and planning and
rehearsing is a good performance. A book is not that unlike a concert, really.
It's just slightly smaller in size and easier to tote around.
