I have been carrying a paragraph for years now
. I know it without reading it. The rhythm tells me it is there before the cursor reaches it, a cluster of words I chose when I did not trust the sentence before it to do its work. I wrote it as insurance. I am keeping it for the same reason.This is what revision is, mostly. Not the finding of better words. The culling of sentences that were never necessary.
I came to this understanding late. My early drafts were dense. The more I said, the less the reader would have to supply. I did not trust the white space. I filled it.
A writing teacher I had at the Yale Writers Workshop (Hi Mary!) told me that deletion is not subtraction. It is revelation. You do not remove sentences from a piece of writing. You remove sentences from between the reader and the piece of writing.
The essay I keep returning to, the one in The Smudged Hyphen I wrote at the very end, is one of the shorter ones. Maybe seven hundred words. I wrote it four times before I found the draft that held, and each version was shorter than the one before. The last cut was three paragraphs from the end. I thought I needed them. I had explained what the essay already showed, laid out in careful detail what the preceding four pages had quietly accumulated. Those three were not bad. They were just too late.
When I deleted them, there was a vacuum nothing rushed to fill.
That is the feeling I have come to recognize as a sign that something worked. Not pride. Not relief.
Revision is not a stage. In the writing I care about, it is the work itself. The first draft is permission to have something to cut. I write the long way around so I can find the shorter path. I write the explanation so I can locate what it was explaining. I write the caption so I can decide whether the image needs one.
It usually does not.
Some writing announces its intentions at the top of every paragraph, explains itself in case the reader missed it, circles back to confirm. I wrote that way for a long time. I sometimes still do. The anxiety is still in me. I catch the lines even now that are there to reassure myself rather than serve the piece.
The discipline is learning to tell the difference. Which sentence is doing work. Which one is doing worry.
Right now I am in the middle of a manuscript that is not ready. Not because it is incomplete. The pages exist. Because I can still see the insurance sentences. The paragraphs I wrote to prove I had done the thinking, rather than to trust the reader to do it alongside me.
The process is familiar. You write the long version. You cut what you were afraid to leave out. You find what you actually meant to say.
You sit very still.
Leave a Reply