Chasing the Revision Butterfly

My friend and writer colleague Caroline Starr Rose suggested I read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders (reflections on stories he’s lovingly taught for two decades at Syracuse). Also Saunders is the author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a storytelling feat in its own right.

Caroline, this one’s for you. You sent along a snippet of text from A Swim…:

The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.

That hit me squarely on a day when I was feeling stuck on a revision ledge. I’d received comments on a novel draft from someone whose judgment I trusted—only this person was telling me it wasn’t there yet. Too many questions remained unresolved. My reader suggested some possible ways to approach revision—structure? Consolidating omniscient passages? Strengthening the character? Where was the story leading? Were there too many rhetorical questions? And more.

I wanted to jump in and make this work in progress irresistible, but I didn’t want to revise the heart out of it. I was all ready to embrace the work, but something kept holding me back. So I took a break and read A Swim in a Pond….

Halfway through, my reader’s comments began to clarify, to swim into focus, one might say. I realized those comments were telling me what the reader thought might be solutions. But the problem—that was something else. The problem was distance and lack of engagement. The fix could be one of many technical adjustments, or something else altogether.

So I decided to revise, but my way. I’d focus only on character, to begin with. I’d zoom in on the young protagonist in my novel and see where he led me. Because as Saunders says: 

A lifetime of writing has left me with one thing: the knowledge of how I do it. Or, to be completely honest, a knowledge of how I have done it.

Photo by Calvin Mano on Unsplash

At the risk of heaping an unrelated metaphor onto the present mix of swimming, ponds, and rain, that revision felt like chasing a butterfly. I wanted to see it unfold its wings but I also knew that I wanted it out in the world, living its butterfly life. Not pinned onto a corkboard. Following even a thoughtful reader’s suggestions verbatim would pin my story down rather than set it free.

This is what I've told students for nearly 20 years. Addressing someone else’s speed-bumps in a draft is an absolutely valid goal, because I also want readers and these are readerly concerns. That said, don’t follow my suggestions unthinkingly—instead, try to sense the discomfort that underlies them, and work to dispel that, any way you choose. How you do it—that’s entirely up to you.

Because it’s your truth, right?

The Door to the Truth Might be Strangeness.

That’s the title of the chapter discussing that strangest of strange stories by Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”: if you don’t know it, go lose yourself in its thickets for a while and see what you think. It begins with a nose in a loaf of bread. Ivan finds the nose. His wife immediately insists that he, a barber, has cut it off a client’s face. You’d think he’d protest, knowing he’s done no such thing. But Ivan doesn’t contradict Praskovya, and Saunders tells us there’s the first pointer to the weirdness of this story:

…in the distance between his reaction and what ours would have been the Gogolian world begins to be made.

There are other characters—policemen, the owner of the nose, the nose itself, a doctor, a clerk who speaks the truth, a woman with a daughter she’s trying to marry off, and more. Endless turns that double back on themselves and lead apparently nowhere. For Ivan, saddled with a nose, paranoia results. It turns out to be justified. It’s followed by the reminder that we are in a story. A story, moreover, that doesn’t add up.

But what if it isn’t meant to? Here’s Saunders:

And just like that – Like one of those Tibetan monks who spent weeks fastidiously creating a sand Mandala – Gogol happily destroys his magnificent creation and sweeps it into the river.

This is one of those books you can’t read all at once or at least I can’t. Like Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses, or Ursula Le Guin’s The Wave in the Mind, though, I think I’m going to need it on my bookshelf, for those days when revision leaves me stranded. Riff on voice and structure, follow one sentence into the next, and your mind feels capable once more of conjuring a thrill of wings.