Poetry revision is no different than revising our other writing

Every morning during the poetry workshop I attended last week at Esalen, one of our three instructors gave us a poetry craft talk. The workshop, called Writing and Knowing and led by Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar, gave me a lot of new information about how to write  - and revise - poetry. As promised, I'm going to try to relate some of the things this wise trio of poets taught us.

Ellen discussed revision - and this information sounded very much like what I've heard about revising  memoirs, novels, and works of non fiction. Revising poems takes a lot of work. As she said, we must work at it. In fact, she said, good poets like to revise. Here are some of her hints:

• Keep original versions so you can go back and compare
• Simply cut out the bad parts - easier said than done
• Distinguish between the essential and non-essential
• Pretend it isn’t your poem when you sit down to revise - I love this idea
• Delete unnecessary opening lines, repetition, explanation, adjectives, adverbs - sound familiar?
• Try rewriting without looking at the original
• Put best line at the top and then start a new poem
• If one line goes to the next page, take one line out - it's always easy to delete a line - right?
• Find what the poem has to have
• And if you're still stuck, get help - by the way, I asked Joseph Millar to help me with my poetry manuscript a few years back. He helped a lot.
• Deeper revision: reshape the entire poem and then do major surgery on it - that's right, murder those babies.

Right now I'm just sitting with this list and taking it all in. It looks like a lot of work. Of course that's what revision is all about - doing the hard work.

Poetry books by Ellen Bass

Getting into revision

I took a workshop in novel revision last February and began my revision work in full force in March. My first job was to make sure every chapter was complete. In many cases I found I needed to add descriptions, research details, and dialogue, Once I did that, I could finally say I had a complete novel draft ready to be revised. That became revision 1 which I collected in a computer folder called 02. Novel Chapters.

Then, as advised in the workshop, I printed out a hard copy of the entire draft and read it through, taking notes in a notebook – not on the draft material itself – to indicate what fixes I thought I needed to make.

I also took a couple of detours. I inserted the Prologue into Chapter One and changed the tense in that chapter from present to past. However, I still haven’t yet decided to keep or integrate the Prologue into the main text and/or to change the entire novel into past tense. Hopefully my beta readers will advise me on that.

At this point I’m working through my second pass-through of the draft and creating revision 2 that I will place in a folder called 03. Novel Chapters. See my screen shot on how I’ve arranged these files. Needless to say, I save everything – just in case I have to resurrect one of the “babies I’ve murdered” in my haste.

I’m lucky to have specific feedback from my writing group and novel classmates to help me revise the first few chapters, which unfortunately don't exist for later chapters. So I plan to apply the gist of their comments as I get further along. I also made a list of things to be aware of as I edit:

• Use Point of view correctly – the hardest part for me to keep straight
• Use more metaphors
• Excessive use of “he” and “she”
• Use action verbs instead of passive voice
• Show emotional response in characters
• Look for and get rid of repetition, inconsistencies, and typos
• Add more specific details that show rather than tell
• Take away definition of foreign Yiddish words; rather use definition in dialogue or description.

My workshop instructor also gave me three helpful pieces of advice to apply overall:

• Slow down
• Delve deeper into the details
• Draw out the moments.

It’s no wonder it took me almost three hours to revise the first two pages of Chapter 4 yesterday. Yes, this work grueling and slow, but I really was getting into it. Hopefully I’ll feel the same today.

My memoir revision process

Since I’ve been on the topic of revision, I thought I’d share the revision process I followed while getting my memoir ready for publication.

I eagerly took on the task of editing and revising my memoir manuscript. I had spent many years editing and rewriting proposals to the U.S. Government, and I used much of this experience to revise my book. One of the first lessons I learned on that job was to plan before doing, and that was the first thing I did before embarking on my rounds of revisions. Here’s my process.

1. Create a revision plan. I created a revision plan based on my publisher’s and first reader’s notes. Once I buy-in from my publisher to this plan, I was ready to get to work.

2. Don’t edit as you write. Write, wait a while, then edit: Leave your work alone for as long a time as you can before sitting down to edit it. While I spent over two years querying agents and small presses, my manuscript laid dormant. So when I finally got my book contract, I read it front to back, chapter by chapter, with my revision plan in hand. I marked up a hard copy with a red pen. Also I made no electronic changes to any part of my manuscript until I completed this first round of edits. And surprise, surprise, I found lots of things to edit, including typos, awkward sentences, repetition, and inconsistencies. Unbelievable! After all the times I had gone over it! During this first edit pass, I also looked for places to insert the new material necessary to my story and where I needed to update material that was clearly out of date.

3. Post a hard copy of your book on storyboards. I set up foam storyboards along the walls of the long hall next to my office and pinned up a printed copy of each chapter as I electronically finished incorporating my first round of edits. Storyboarding allowed me see the book all at once and better spot redundancies and inconsistencies and places that needed cutting, moving, and expanding. I also saw where each chapter best belonged. I highlighted my problem-child text in yellow, so I could see where I needed to go back and revise again.

My storyboards

4. Have others review your work. After I completed the first round of edits and reworked the yellow-highlighted portions, I gave an electronic copy of the book to three willing writer friends. One person did a line-by-line edit – and he too, found punctuation and sentence structure problems. Another friend looked at the content for repetition, inconsistencies, and writing accuracy. And the person who originally helped me create my revision plan read it again for ways to best organize the book. She made suggestions about where to move things around and which chapters could be eliminated or combined.

5. Take your reviewer’s suggestions as just that. I made sure I was still in control of my book. I decided whether to take my editor's notes or not. I was the person with the last red pen. Even my publisher said,

"I know you are working very hard on the final draft of your book, and I like that you are keeping in mind that it is YOUR book, YOUR story, and YOUR voice. Others can only offer advice. Only you can write this book."

So I reviewed each comment, fixed what I thought relevant, and filed the rest away.

6. Create a schedule with real milestones and stick to it. Because I was reliant on other people’s inputs, I needed a schedule with hard and fast deadlines for them, and me, and in keeping with my publisher’s schedule. I made it tight. I gave myself five months to complete everything, including incorporating my revisions and reviewer’s comments; merging the finished chapters into one document; gathering photos for the cover and body of the book; getting permissions to use quotes from other authors, and writing dust jacket and book cover copy.

7. Keep going over your manuscript until you’re satisfied with it.  I kept asking myself, what does finished really mean? Even after incorporating the relevant review comments I realized I still needed to make a few little changes, add a few little things, and make a few more edits. In all I must have gone over each of the manuscript chapters at least four (some many more) times during my entire revision process. I knew I was really done when I stopped thinking what I could to the book, when I didn’t have any more changes or adds or deletes or reorganization ideas left in me, when my mind stopped living and breathing the book every waking moment of every day, and when I was comfortable letting it go.

This piece was originally published at Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents website on May 20, 2011

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/guide-to-literary-agents/the-revision-process-how-i-prepared-my-book-for-publication