To revise or not to revise

Not that I want to keep blogging about being sick, but since it has taken over my world for the moment, it’ll unfortunately keep cropping up until it disappears. Which doesn’t look like it’ll be anytime soon. I’ve spent the whole day in bed, pretty much.

Almost. I did manage to lug myself up to campus this afternoon for a few hours, primarily to get some church stuff done that had to get done, and while I was up there I decided to try sticking around for Orson Scott Card’s “1001 Ideas in an Hour” session at LTUE.

I won’t go over the whole thing, since this pounding in my head makes it hard to write. The most interesting part to me was at the very end, when one of the attendees asked, “How many revisions do you do?”

Card said, “When I type the last word of the last chapter for the first time, I send it to my publisher.” That’s right. No revisions. He went on to say that he will start a piece over several times until he gets it right, but after that it’s a straight shot without any tweaking.

His rationale, he said, was that the first draft is always the most alive, even if it’s a little ragged. But so many people polish and smooth their drafts until they’re sparkling little gems which are absolutely dead.

It’s an interesting thought, one that took me rather by surprise, but I can see where he’s coming from. I’ll have to try it with my own work and see if that’s what happens. But in the meantime it’s back to bed for me — o the joy! ~sigh~

I’m certainly no Orson Scott Card, but I work in very much the same way. I am forever tweaking and rearranging as I begin, but the minute I’m done, I’m done. The energy of a first draft can never be matched in revision—the emotion is raw, crackling and–exactly!–alive.

Which is why a little afternoon reading in high school journals is so perfectly invigorating. :)

I write sort of the same way myself. It may take me forever to get started, to really get going, but then once I do, there’s not much to revise at the end. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t revise and I’m not open to revision suggestions from others. After I finish a story, sometimes I do change it drastically, because that’s what it’s really supposed to be. I guess for me it’s one of those things where you really just have to listen to the story and let it tell you where it wants to go. If you got a chance to hear Gail Carson Levine at noon today, she talked about having two or three very different drafts for a few of her stories; she worked until she got them right.

E: Haha, reading my high school journals usually ends up being mortifying instead of invigorating — it’s not till I started college that they become tolerable. :) As for revising, you know, in retrospect I’m finding that that’s pretty much how I write blog posts — I may start over several times, but rarely do I go back over it after I’ve finished the first draft. Hmm.

Marisa: I wanted to go hear Gail Carson Levine today, but I’ve been sick in bed all day. (No sign of it letting up yet, either. ~sigh~) I suspect the whole not-revising thing might only apply if you know what you’re doing — if you’re reasonably confident in where you’re going with the story, that is. Thinking back to my first play, it needed substantial revisions precisely because I didn’t really know what I was doing and because it wasn’t even produceable. I submitted my second play as a first draft with a handful of minor changes, however, and it got accepted with no questions asked.

And for the first time in my life, I feel semi-vindicated for never ever proof-reading my English papers.

The end.

Truth be told, I never proofread or revised my school papers either. Nowadays I never write them. :) (Long story. Though the way it’s looking, it might be a rather short one instead.)