In 2018, I published an essay that collected some of my thoughts about what writers should think about prior to submitting their work to literary journals. That piece was based on a talk I’d given that year at the Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston. I returned to the Muse in the spring of 2019 and delivered a sequel to that talk, one in which I was able to include a few more thoughts (and expand upon previous ones) on revision. That initial essay was long, maybe too long, but I felt compelled to follow it up because I’d failed to mention a few small but important points. In particular, I wanted to address moments of incremental action and talk about the problem of assigning motivation and actions to characters rather than to body parts. I also wanted to take an opportunity to encourage writers to stay in the driver’s seat and to revise to their own standards. Finally, I wanted to point out that while revision can sometimes utterly transform a work, that’s not always such a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably a necessary part of the process. Here’s a somewhat edited version of that talk, followed by ten additional thoughts on revision.
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You may not know the name Cecilia Giménez, but you likely remember the story of her attempted restoration of a 1930s fresco Ecce Homo. The work was created by Elías García Martínez, a Spanish painter, portraitist, and professor of art at the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes de Zaragoza, as a gift to the Satuario de Misercordia in Borja, Spain.
The story of Giménez’s restoration originated on an historical association’s blog dedicated to Borja studies and was subsequently picked up by newspapers in Spain and the UK. It didn’t take long for the news to travel, and the Internet being the Internet, the botched restoration quickly made the rounds, generating sincere criticism and concern and far less sincere memes. The Ecce Homo, a Latin phrase from the Vulgate Bible uttered by Pontius Pilate meaning “Behold the Man,” was quickly dubbed the Ecce Mono (“Behold the Monkey”) and “Beast Christ,” “Christ the Irredeemable,” and the “Potato Jesus.” Giménez, a lay artist, an octagenarian, and a parishioner of the Santuario de Misercordia who had volunteered her time and talents to the church, was thrown into an anxious depression following the publicity and ridicule, but in her story is a decent metaphor about writing and revision.
But before I make the comparison explicit, I should admit that I love the “Beast Christ,” the post-restoration version of the “Ecce Homo,” so much more than I could ever have loved the original work of art. I don’t love it because I revel in the destruction of historical artifacts, but because the artist herself is a congregant who’d seen the work frequently and watched as it deteriorated over time. Compelled by a love for the work and a sincere belief that she could help reverse the water damage it had suffered, she set out to save something she loved, to make what was old and deteriorating new and lasting, to preserve this small part of the sanctuary in which she herself had been married. On the one hand, the Ecce Homo fresco is irrevocably ruined. It is so ruined that conservationists have declared that any attempt to undo Giménez’s work would be fruitless, that the damage done would be far worse than the initial water damage and the attempted restoration.
I don’t revel in that loss, but I do appreciate what’s been gained. Giménez’s restored Ecce Homo is now more famous and more frequently visited than at any other time in the painting’s history. The church now charges a small fee to see it, has hired staffers to run the small museum, and sells “Beast Christ” merch—the image adorns mugs, shirts, keychains, and the like, with the proceeds going to the maintenance and preservation of the santuario itself. It’s a strange and beautiful irony, I suppose, that the loss of the historical artifact has led to the broader preservation of the sanctuary itself and to revitalized tourism in the region.
If there’s are two lessons for writers to be learned from the “Beast Christ,” they are:
First: Don’t fear revision. Your stories aren’t carved in stone, nor are they painted onto the walls of historically significant Spanish churches. Try to engage in the revision process with the same gusto and verve that you sometimes feel when drafting a story, and with the same compassion that led Giménez to attempt her restoration of the Ecce Homo. The results of that revision may surprise and delight you, or they may horrify you. The results may not be what you expected, but they may also make you very famous. And, in any case, we’re talking about handwriting or word processing, not the delicate art of restoration.
Second: Save every draft of your work so that if you do end up engaging in the writerly equivalent of turning the living Christ into a howler monkey, you can always go back to the old version. A digital document is, of course, far less precious and far easier to revise than a 90-year-old fresco.
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More Observations on Revision
Ranked in Order from the Relatively Minor to the Relatively Major
1. Farther/Further and Lay/Lie: Most of us know that their, there, and they’re are individual words with individual meanings. So, too, are the words farther, further, lay, and lie.Further/Farther: Farther refers to physical and geographic distances, as in “My mother is sitting farther away from me than my brother is” or “Paris is farther away from Nice than it is from London.” Further refers to theoretical or abstract distances, as in “He felt further away from her than he ever had” and “To push the issue any further during their therapy session would result in their mutual emotional destruction.” Lay/Lie: To lay means to place, so it needs an object, as in “The manager lay the manual on the counter.” To lie means to recline, as in “They needed to lie down.” This is complicated for the following reason: the simple past tense conjugation of lie is lay, as in “He lay on the bed, still as a corpse.” Writers Digest has a handy conjugation chart that can help you keep it straight.
2. Be wary of writing sentences that show incremental action needlessly. This one may be the result of doing the hard work of drafting. When deciding what a character should do in a story, we’re inventing those actions from whole cloth, so we may stumble our way through a scene, trying to figure out how a person should move, act, behave, etc. Incremental action happens when a writer describes the components of a motion, gesture, or action rather than simply describing the action outright. In revision, it’s often a good idea (unless there’s a good reason not to, as when a writer wants to slow down the action of a scene in order to elevate tension) to edit out those incremental actions in favor of more direct actions.
Example:
Original: Ellen began to rise from her chair when the doorbell rang.
If it’s unimportant to know that she was beginning to rise, it may be preferable to write: Ellen rose from her chair when the doorbell rang.
Alternatively, if it’s important to the writer to show that Ellen is unenthusiastic about having a visitor, that she’s tired, or that she’s sore or stiff or has difficulty walking, you may consider using incremental action, such as: When the bell rang, Ellen stood, stretched, and slowly started for the front door.
3. I love the Great British Baking Show, too, but beware the random British-isms. One of my favorite poets and dearest pals is the writer Jane Lewty. A modernist scholar and an incredible poet, Dr. Lewty hails from Leeds, and she’s got one of those excellent northern accents that we Americans tend to find charming (it really is). When we began teaching together at a small college north of Baltimore, our students (adorably) had no idea that when Dr. Lewty was saying “beamer” that she was referring to the projector that hung from the classroom’s ceiling. When I first heard her say it, I heard Bimah, the podium from which the Torah is read during services in a Synagogue. (Suffice it to say, at our little, formerly Catholic college, she wasn’t referring to that kind of Bimah.) Which is to say, Jane Lewty employs all manner of idioms and diction that would sound bizarre in my native Californian mouth. Coming across seemingly random British-isms in a story written in what seems to be North American English can be similarly strange for readers. Whether it’s the minor sin of spelling gray with an e, or the serious sin of dropping a random C-word in what is supposed to be a light and funny (or “British?”) manner, I think it’s best to stick with spellings and usages that are common or familiar to you. This is less about staying in your lane than it is about writing a story that’s tonally and linguistically cohesive.
In other words, there’s not much ethical weight to this consideration, though there is aesthetic weight to it. The caveat here is this: you may very well write a character who speaks this way, who peppers their speech with a “top o’ the mornin’ govnah!” or asks others if they’d care for “a spot of tea.” In the mouths of characters, all things are possible, but don’t let your prose unduly or unintentionally imitate the ways of thinking or speaking that are particular to a character (this is called the imitative fallacy).
I should also add that if an American literary journal publishes fiction by a writer working in British Standard English, they may or may not Americanize that story’s diction. We tend not do this at American Short Fiction, for the same reason that we don’t italicize non-English words in stories written predominantly in English: we want the work to reflect the writer’s preferred voice, style, and usage.
4. Comma splices and sentence fragments abound, which can be a good thing. You can write all the comma splices and sentence fragments you want, but it’s best to know which “rules” you’re breaking and why you’re breaking them. Thoughtless or unintentional grammatical deviations run the risk of telling your reader and editor that you don’t know what you’re doing or that you’re unsure of whether you should be doing it. I’m all for breaking rules. Make new rules. Abide by your own aesthetics and principles, but be prepared for an editor to ask you why you’re doing what you’re doing. Be prepared for readers and reviewers to do this, too. When they point to a comma splice or a sentence fragment, you should know precisely what they’re talking about.
5. Beware of independently sentient body parts. This is an oldie but goodie, and it’s one that often causes me some delight. Especially when we’re working in a tight narrative passage, a passage that we want to carry maximum tension or sincerity, we tend to focus on describing small gestures and movements of our characters. There’s real pleasure to be found in getting to see that almost imperceptibly thin, blue-green vein in a character’s ankle, or a length of hair stuck to a character’s lip, but when we’re in that tight space or working in moments of high tension, we sometimes lose sight of the whole and ascribe action to the parts of the body instead of ascribing the action to the character and their intentions. Some examples: Her eyes shot across the table, shutting him up entirely. Corey’s hands danced along the bar and stopped to caress Tonya’s knuckles. Their eyes were glued to each other. Obviously, the intention here is to make an artful, figurative sense, but readers may misunderstand that intention and could reasonably conjure some pretty bizarre images after encountering these sentences.
6. Scrutinize the openings of your stories (and essays) in an effort to find the work’s most natural opening. For a lot of us (myself included) drafting new work is the most exciting part of the writing process. When it’s going well, the words seem to come effortlessly. (Of course, like the morning after a night of drinking, there’s often pain in reevaluating the events of evening’s revelry, but that’s how it goes.)
If there’s one thing I see in a lot of work—in the slush pile and in agented submissions and in my own writing—it’s stories that spin their wheels for a paragraph or two (or sometimes a page or two) before they get going. I think we have a natural tendency to lead our readers into our stories in much the same way we came to write them. Some snippet of overheard conversation, some old house from our childhood, or some current disagreement with our siblings gets us going, and to provide ourselves with a way into a story, we use that context. We may even spend a good deal of time and effort polishing up the description of that house; the argument we had with that brother; the bit of conversation we overheard while standing in line at the Aunt Annie’s Pretzel stand in the mall. What sometimes happens, though, is that this expository information or this narrative passage or this quick snippet of scene gets incredibly polished and refined during our initial drafting and revision processes, even though it may ultimately be vestigial. The story’s real starting gun could be farther down the page—when we learn that the siblings have to take shifts next to their mother’s hospice bed, or when we learn that the old house burned to the ground, taking the neighbor’s condo with it. Be wary of confusing your very good, very beautiful, very polished openings with the story’s most natural opening. A decent way to test for this might be by asking yourself this: “By the end of this story, should my readers still care about that old house or about the squabble these siblings once had?” If the answer is no, consider cutting it and beginning in a moment that your reader should still care about and remember by the story’s end.
7. On that note, ask yourself if your ending provides the right kind of closure for your reader. In her work of literary theory Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, theorist, professor, and critic Barbara Hernstein Smith defines “terminal modification” as the ways in which poems may signal (subtly or unsubtly) to readers that the poem they are encountering is nearing its close. Songs, too, (especially western pop songs) can signal their endings by first establishing some iteration of a common pop music pattern that usually goes something like: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus. By the time you get to the bridge, we’re usually closer to the song’s ending than we are to its beginning. In this case, it’s five sevenths of the way through the pattern. I mention this because endings are, for many of us, really freaking hard. Some stories drop off suddenly, leaving us wondering why we haven’t known more or learned anything else or spent more time with a character. Other endings seem interminable, with the story spinning its wheels until we put it down without finishing it. While I cannot (and would not ever attempt to) provide you with some formula for devising endings, I can say that the stories that excite me are those in which the elements of the ending (the diction, the concrete images, the sensory information) is in some conversation with the story’s opening.
This is by no means universal advice or a statement of universal taste, but I think it’s at least a useful exercise to look at your ending paragraphs or pages and compare it to your story’s opening paragraphs or pages. What images, ideas, sensory details, or bits of diction or prosody (prose writers need to think about sound, too) are inherent to your opening? Do they show up in your ending? Should they? Could they be subverted in your story’s ending? If your story begins with that house fire, does it end with a rainstorm? Should it? Play with how your story’s ending can serve as a twin (or an evil twin) to your story’s opening. The net effect, in this case, may be a sense that the story itself is whole and satisfying, or that it’s operating on an unseen yet reassuring logic.
8. Find your tics, know your tics. This bit advice is much like one I gave last year called Avoid filler phrases and empty words, and I’m including it because one thing that hadn’t occurred to me the when I delivered that first iteration of this talk was that, much as our bodies betray us over time (my hair is thinning, my waist expanding, my shoulders are growing rounder), even our foibles or writerly tics evolve. Seven years ago, I was at a writers conference in a workshop with someone I really admired. He was, and is, one of my favorite writers, and as it turns out, he’s also a spectacularly kind man. One of the kindest, really. When I saw that this very smart, very talented, and immensely kind man had marked up my story by circling the word “Just” (as in It was just that Dan didn’t know what he wanted her to feel… and If he could just talk to her… and Just think of it and Couldn’t he just give it up?), I was embarrassed. Worse, when I reached the story’s twelfth page I encountered the note Nate: if I have to circle one more just in this story, I may have to do myself in.
Of course, he wasn’t actually going to kill himself, but it will never not be true that I’d led this famously kind man to, at least jokingly, want to die because of a tic that, until that moment, I had overlooked. The remedy, I think, is to cherish the writer and reader friends who will give you an honest read on a draft. You should also aim to understand how your language evolves. While I’ve gotten good at excising “just” from my prose, the odd “of course” and “obviously” have crept in. Be vigilant in monitoring lazy usages because other people will notice it even if you don’t.
9. Know the difference between depiction and endorsement, and know the values inherent to your own text(s). Our literature would be unimaginably diminished if we couldn’t write about atrocities, awful human beings, and capital-E Evil. But, generally speaking, readers want some assurance that what is being depicted is being shown to them in an effort to help us understand or feel something that’s fraught or complicated. In this way, fiction can present potent thought experiments: in the hands of the right writer, I don’t have to lose both parents in a war to know something of being violently and suddenly orphaned. In the hands of a talented writer, I needn’t lose an arm to understand something of the bizarre sensations of a phantom limb. In the hands of a thoughtful and sensitive writer, I can come very close to all manner of fires and never go up in flames. A fiction writer’s interests, curiosities, obsessions, motivations, and proclivities often seem to exist below the text itself. Often, this is one of the greatest pleasures to be found in literature. Reading Lauren Groff’s Arcadia and sensing how the author’s interest in mythology is intertwined with information about intentional communities and agriculture and ecology is like being let in on some secret world whose fabric the author has alchemically woven together out of these individual lines of interest, research, and obsession.
Still, sometimes the alchemy is bad, or some ineffable attitude seems to spoil the story like a rotten egg ruining the pancake batter. If the ineffable obsessions of a writer or the values of a text seem to be born of bigotry, misogyny, cruelty, prejudice, or inexplicable violence, I’m going to stop reading the piece. As readers, you probably know what it feels like to sense an agenda behind a writer’s prose. In editorial writing, you should be able to recognize the agenda. When it comes to fiction, I’m looking to be challenged, engaged, entertained, and moved, and if I’m too distracted by egregious and inexplicable wrongness, then I’m prevented from participating fully in any meaningful interaction with the text. This is not moral prudishness, nor is it political correctness. Making art is a choice, and it’s one that comes with risks. But there’s all kinds of risky work in the world that doesn’t carry with it skewed values, wrongheaded, cruel, or suspect ideas. Work that is, at times, overtly sexual (James Baldwin, Mary Gaitskill, James Salter, Stacey D’Erasmo), violent (Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Hanya Yanagihara), or that employs harsh or crass language (Jenny Zhang, Irvine Welsh) can be incredibly moving, but in each of these cases, the sex, the violence, the cruelty, the abuse, the wrongness, the crassness, or the evil is not wanton.
Stories may use violence, hatred, and vulgarity in their service, but violence, hatred, and vulgarity divorced from purpose is capricious. Shock value, lazy humor, crassness, or cruelty for their own sake is ultimately uninteresting to me. It can also be painful for readers to encounter on the page, particularly if it comes across as pointless.
10. Finally (and most abstractly) revise to your own standards of taste. My final bit of advice here comes with a very small warning, and it sounds cynical at first. It’s also a bit of a cliché in art-making circles, and it is this: Nobody will ever care about your work as much as you do. But instead of reading that cynically, I take it as a challenge. If it’s true that no other writer, no editor, no publisher, and no reader will ever really understand how much time, energy, love, hard work, struggle, annoyance, excitement, anxiety, and joy went into conceiving of and producing your work, then you are ultimately free of any obligation to change that work according to someone else’s opinion of it. What I mean to say is, remain steadfast in your dedication to the stories you have produced. They are yours. Some editors and some readers and some publishers will have some very good and thoughtful advice for you along the way, but do not let someone jerk the wheel from your hands. Let them give you direction. Let them share with you the atlas they’ve long kept in their glove box. Let them check on the status of the traffic and make suggestions for alternate routes. But you should do the driving. It’s your car, and it’s your destination. Ultimately, you’ll be the only one who can actually get yourself to where you’re going.
Nate Brown is the managing editor of American Short Fiction. He teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University, the George Washington University, and Georgetown University. He lives in Baltimore.