Take a break before revising

Sometimes in my writing journey these last several years, I have taken issue with old writing advice–the mandate to show, don’t tell; the focus on active verbs that overshadows the great work other verbs do; Western literature’s myopic focus on conflict–these are all pieces of inherited writing wisdom that, with deeper thought on my own practice, I’ve come to take now with a grain of salt. But there are a few pieces of advice that I remember from long ago which have never let me down, and one of these concerns the process of revision.

The topic of today’s post is the need to take a gap between drafting and revision, and between multiple rounds of revisions, to return to the text with, as we say sometimes, fresh eyes. Why might we do that? How can we make it most effective? Let’s explore a few ideas today.

The wisdom

The idea of this revision technique is that, after finishing a draft, we should step back. “Put it in a drawer,” I’ve heard folks say, “and go out for a walk. Come back a week later and take the text back up again.” The idea is that we see it more clearly after we have stepped back. We will be able to make smarter revisions, and the text will be closer to our vision.

I give this advice to students with their academic work, and I apply it consistently myself, both with my fiction and my professional writing (the other night I drafted two university recommendations for second-year students; I’m now waiting a few days before I read them through).

The other morning, I opened up the draft of a nonfiction piece I’ve been working on this fall. I had not touched it since September, but my memory recalled the language singing, the feeling I was approaching a final draft. I reread, waiting for those images to blossom clearly, yet instead I found something different than my memory. I found the pacing slow, the language odd and stilted. What a disappointment! Something had changed since the last time I had sat down with this draft, and what had changed was not the writing.

What happens when we step back from the text?

When we sit for hours and days-long, weeks and months with a text, when it is emerging painstakingly from our hearts and minds, there are really two texts at play: there is the physical text we are penning on the page, and then there is the vision that develops inside of us. That vision is a kind of internal text, containing all the feelings, associations, and meanings that this story holds personally for us. Our work as writers is to recreate the internal text on the written page, and so the two grow conflated in our minds. We read the words we have typed out, but internally we are hearing our full vision.

When we step back from the text, something curious happens. The physical text we have produced remains unchanged, waits patiently inert in its .docx file or its journal page. But our internal vision begins its process of disintegration. Like all memory, it dulls, it mutes, sections atrophy and fade, the vision decays to make way for other experiences and thoughts. The stuff of our vision begins its return into the earth, to nourish what is to come, and this is sad and horrible and beautiful and good.

Then we return to the text, and as we read the words we wrote in our creative fever, pieces of our old vision resurface, but others don’t; we rely more on the words we actually wrote down to reconstitute that vision. We are accessing the text now closer to the perspective of the reader than we were before. Our relationship to the text has changed, and we see all of the things that we could not before–the unintended effects, the awkward phrasings, the undeveloped things. We must not blame ourselves: our vision was filled with that internal text.

How to move forward

Taking a break doesn’t change the text; it changes us. Our goal is for the physical text to produce a bright and powerful internal text in our readers, and to do this, we need to move closer to their way of seeing. This is why working with a critique partner is so valuable–they truly are coming to the text unbiased, in ways that we as writers never can. Taking this break helps us to occupy a middle ground.

When we read the old text, we will be thrilled and moved, and at other points we will be disappointed. Our task next is to find those parts of text that recall the vision and save them, other parts restructure and rework, cut and rearrange, reformulate and stitch the text back up again. Then take another break and check again. The more times we do this, the closer we will come to our goal. The physical text takes on more and more of the internal, and it will be preserved then. We can bring it back into our minds every time we read.

Final thoughts

We must say too, that we lose something when we take that break from the text. As our raw vision begins to disassemble, we forget some of its texture and nuance. If we take too long a break, if we come back so far later that the text is but a shadow in our memories, we might not be able to recapture that vision as we read the draft. This might be okay. We’ll end up with a different story in the end that may be just as meaningful as the other, and it’s also okay for an idea to fade away. New ones will emerge perennially.

The passion of that first period of drafting is a kind of magic too. It might indeed cloud us when we reread, but without it, we would have no text at all, and it’s worth nurturing that vision, even as we know the resulting physical text will not quite capture it. It is the spirit of which the text is record. The vision is the thing that keeps us returning to it, after all.

What are your thoughts about taking a break before revising? What are your experiences of coming back to a project you haven’t looked at in some time?

Best wishes for the coming weeks,
Jimmy