An Aside on Revising
I personally find revision
one of the hardest and most puzzling parts of the writing process and am always looking for new ways to disassemble my words.
GlimmerTrain [1]fiction contest winner Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig writes a jubilant list of strategies here [2].
With my favorite being: "Make it delicious. Write with
felt tipped pens on silky paper. Put on the flouncy dress you've been
saving for a special occasion. The stockings and the crinoline too.
Look first-date amazing. Then sit at your desk, and get to
work."
Doesn't that make you want to write right now?
Also, I recently discovered the blog of one of my favorite writers: Bhanu Kapil: Was Jack Kerouac a Panjabi? [3] She is a professor at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, and is always teaching interesting courses on hybridity in writing. Currently teaching a seminar on architecture and writing, she writes:
In some ways, the passage between architecture and hybrid writing is most useful for me when I am re-writing. In Boulder, I sometimes go to see a shaman called Swan Ashley. At least, I think she is a shaman. She lies you down on a table and collects her hands above you and...the closest I can come to describing it is that she creates a kind of suction. All this light is sealed in around your body and it traps the images. It traps them long enough for you to form a narrative in the deepest kind of time. For you to understand what you are seeing. The process of gridding -- whether cubically or in the kind of list Virginia Woolf used to write in pencil above her desk...questions, motifs, sentences...that she could observe when she blanked out...did she blank out?: is like that. It's tonal. It's, as Beatriz Calomina writes, "a double envelope." Writing these notes makes me miss living in a city.
So, there's two pretty unconventional strategies for rewriting. Get to it.