A FEW YEARS BACK, I was stuck on a novel, so I checked myself into the idyllic Weymouth Center for a week of concentrated work.
Setting up a work area in my room, I noticed the wastebasket contained some cast-off manuscript pages from the writer who had preceded me. I love any excuse to procrastinate, so I fished them out for a quick look and realized they were two versions of the same chapter. Version one was obviously rough draft, probably pounded out on the fly. I saw lots of brackets, like this: [DESCRIPTIVE PHRASE] or [SOMETHING HERE]. Placeholder words stood out in all caps, sometimes followed by lists of synonyms. There were “notes to self”–– [IS DOG IN OR OUT?] or [WHAT'S LOCATION?] or [GUN INSTEAD OF KNIFE?].
Yes, it was messy. But what really struck me was the raw energy and power of what I was reading. Who was this writer? I wondered.
Then I flipped on to the revised pages. What a let down. No longer raw, the style had lost its brashness and verve. Many of the words that had made it sizzle were replaced by more formal “literary” language. Rough idiomatic sentence––interesting in the way they revealed a character in the writing––had been smoothed into patterns that were textbook-correct, but no longer true to the narrative voice of the main character, or in a wider sense the writer herself.
Has this ever happened to you? Has one of your trusted readers remarked, “You know, I liked it better before”––and this after you’ve labored so mightily to revise and polish it to literary perfection?
Here’s writing guru Peter Elbow (in Writing with Power):
“People often lack any voice at all in their writing because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to use. They have none of the natural breath in their writing that they have in speaking… We have so little practice in writing, but so much more time to stop and fiddle as we write each sentence.”
I realize Elbow is talking about an even worse phenomenon, the urge to instantly revise and “perfect” your rough draft, even as it steams out of your imagination. But the principle is the same:
“Natural breath,” in a passage of writing, as in a human being, is the cardinal sign of life. If it breathes, it’s alive. What do we aspire to in writing, if not the same level of reader engagement we strive for in a listener when we speak?
For a moment, think of your reader as a listener. If you spoke that piece of revision to someone, in conversation, would you see interest, engagement flickering in her face?
Do this: record a passage––read it aloud yourself, or get someone else to read it. Wait a while, then listen to the playback. If it sounds flat, put your text away and improvise the passage. (Sometimes you get the most “conversational” result by talking it to someone–a friend, or your “trusted reader.”)
Record this version, then transcribe it. Put the two versions side by side and compare. Rough as it might be, is the transcription fresher, more fun to read than the original?
If so…what did you do right?
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