In a post on Lit Hub, Sorayya Khan says revising might not be our favorite aspect of writing, but we should all make peace with it.
After three years working on her first novel, Khan finally cut the manuscript into pieces to see if she could make order out of chase. “First, I sorted the oddly shaped fragments by point of view. Second, I re-ordered the narrative by plot line. Third, I arranged it into chronological order,” she says. “It didn’t matter what I did, my novel would not fall into place.”
After several more drafts, she put the novel away. Many years later, she would craft two novels from its pieces. In between, she started another novel, this one with a limited timeline and POV. This time, the novel’s structure made itself apparent more quickly. “I laid out the cards on my bed again and again, gaining confidence and certainty of what would go where and why, learning how to build tension, and finally, a novel,” Khan writes.
By the time she wrote her memoir, We Take Our Cities with Us, Khan was more comfortable with allowing outlines and structure keep her narrative under control. Still, she took her scissors to the first draft. Eventually, she found her story. “I wonder what I might have made of my road map had it arrived simultaneously with the idea for the book,” Khan writes. “I envy the writer who starts with an outline, fixed and exact, who embarks on a journey always knowing where she is going and where she has been.” However, each writer has their own process and this is the one that worked for this story. Khan acknowledges that she would not have discovered this route if she hadn’t taken it.
“We find our own ways into and through the books we write, but the journey always involves opening ourselves up to possibilities,” she says. “We experiment with a different word, a shorter line of dialogue, an additional scene, a new beginning until we stumble on the combination that best serves our story. In doing so, we see, we see again, we see differently. We reconceptualize.”
