In a conversation with Lit Hub‘s First Draft podcast, Peter Ho Davies talks about his latest book, The Art of Revision, and why we fear revising our work.
One big obstacle for writers is the concern that changing one scene or element of a novel will force you to rewrite the entire thing from the beginning. That’s not so bad for the second or third draft, but what about the fourth or tenth? It can wear a body down. Davies says we should try to reframe those fears as positives.
“I think we have that feeling as we change something in a story, maybe even fix something in the story—it feels that we’ve taken one step forward, but then when we’ve made that change, it creates a couple of new questions. You can feel like one step forward and two steps back,” he says. “But I think that complication in a story, while it might push us or seem to push us further away from completion, is also a way of opening up new possibilities, which is to say new depths, new richness, new densities, new textures in a story, which I think are all ultimately to the benefit of the work going forward as well.”
Davies even suggests that a successful revision is one that requires another revision, because it opens your story to new possibilities and questions.
“Sometimes when any of us have had a lot of feedback from a trusted critic or reader, it often feels as though there are just so many things to address that we don’t know where to start,” Davies adds. Instead, he recommends that we try to address one or two areas in a follow-up draft, instead of fixing every problem, starting with low-hanging fruit and feedback areas we agree with. “Those are often fairly small things, but it does feel as though we get to progress the draft, move it forward, so it’s good for morale,” he says. Davies also suggests starting with the elements that most interest or excite you. “That might be something playful; it might not necessarily be tackling the most urgent problem in the story, but I suspect that intuition of what’s exciting to us in a draft as we go forward is often a way to make those discoveries, that feeling there’s something here, there’s something I’d like to explore, something I’d like to write into—that feels like identifying a space of energy in the story as well.”
