Subversive revision

Revision is strange.

You spend weeks, months, even years, going through multiple drafts of a manuscript. These words you’ve written, they’re not just words anymore. You have a history with them. You know them.

So when I revise, I feel a little like a deviant monk, scribbling in the margins of some sacred text I was only supposed to transcribe. Cutting out a phrase here, a paragraph there, putting new words in the mouths of saints whose canon went unchanged for centuries. What will the abbot think when he learns of these shenanigans?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not squeamish. If a scene doesn’t work, if a paragraph has to go, I seek and obliterate those suckers like a Sicilian plumber at a Goomba convention. Destroying one’s words has its own kind of joy; it’s cleansing. Yet it still feels, at some level, vaguely subversive.

This weekend I added a whole new chapter, written entirely from scratch. If fiddling with paragraphs is subversive, adding new scenes feels downright heretical. I stare at the infinite possibility of the blank page, and I think: really? You mean I can take these beloved characters, these people whose stories I thought I already knew, and make them do whatever I want?

Oh, hell yeah I can. And it’s fun, the way starting a new book is fun.

But this reverence for what’s gone before, for the draft as currently written, makes a certain amount of sense. If I can cram yet a third simile into this straining post, revising a manuscript is like hiking a trail. You forge the first draft from nothing, hacking through undergrowth, wondering where you’re going. But each time you pass over the trail again, whether it’s a full revision or just a re-read, you smooth the path in your passing. Almost subconsciously, you adjust, correct, improve. The result of many such passes is writing that’s polished, that’s been thought about a lot. And every time you leave that well-worn path, you’re cutting a new detour through the jungle, and the new path is rough, at first. There are panthers in the jungle. You were right to be wary.

But if you only walk down the same old path, you’ll only get to that same old destination.

Forge the trail.

Write the heresies.

Stomp the Goombas.