This consideration of revision began as an attempt to clarify a sentence in the “Workshop Guidelines” in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program Handbook; it expanded as part of a discussion of how fiction writers most benefit from analytical writing; it underwent another transformation in a syllabus for a graduate workshop at the University of Houston; sincere and challenging questions posed by those students resulted in a version presented at the AWP conference in Austin; and that audience’s response has informed the current version.

Paving the Road; or, Developing Good Intentions

By Peter Turchi

When I was young, despite the countless hours I spent swimming, sailing, ice skating, snowshoeing, hiking, dusting for fingerprints, and just generally sleuthing with the Hardy Boys, I was not what you would call likely to excel at the President’s Physical Fitness Exam.

My father was the oldest of three brothers, all of whom played every sport they could, and especially football. My father left home as a teenager to join the United States Marines, an organization well-known for its attention to physical fitness. On the other side of the family, my grandfather was eventually inducted into the Maryland Sports Hall of Fame, and my mother’s brother pitched for the Baltimore Orioles*. Some people might have thought that this was quite enough athleticism for one family; others might have reasonably concluded that, by the time it got to me, the gene pool just ran out of gas, physical fitness-wise; but my father somehow thought I was responsible. That is why, one afternoon after school when I was 10 or so, as I planted myself on the couch and picked up whatever book I was in the middle of, my ex-Marine father appeared with a stopwatch and whistle and said: “I want you to start running around the yard.”

I’m sure I looked at him as if he had said, “I want you to start diving off the chimney.” It would be inaccurate to say I had no interest in running around the yard; I had quite a significant amount of hostility toward the suggestion. But of course it wasn’t a suggestion. My father insisted—he was nothing if not insistent, my father—but to his great disappointment, nothing came of it. I ran around the yard once or twice—well, let’s call it “running,” though I was to running what the Hindenburg was to the speed of sound. I circled the yard, morose, every afternoon for a few days, maybe a week; but when my father, a traveling salesman, went back on the road, the plan dissolved.

Leap ahead 20 years. I’ve played a few sports and even enjoyed them, but never have I been mistaken for an athlete. My wife and I are about to have a child. My father is in bad health, and I’m thinking it would be good to stay around for a while—that some regular exercise might be called for. We lived then on the edge of a development of starter homes; our bedroom window looked out on a 5-acre floodplain. Out of sheer orneriness, I decided that I would jog around the floodplain. After carefully calculating when most of our neighbors were least likely to be home, I went out and did it—of my own accord, I jogged.

I went perhaps 200 yards before various things—I suspected they were muscles—began to hurt. Breathing became painful. My heart moved into my ears, and hammered an unsteady rhythm. By the time I got back to the house, what felt like a few hours later, I thought I would throw up. It took most of the rest of the day to recover. I had gone, at most, half a mile.

For the same reason some people poke sticks in their eyes, and others insist on carrying items given by a person or persons unknown to them onboard the aircraft, I did it again, and again a few days after that. Before long it was not particularly challenging to jog around the floodplain, so I went out onto the streets of our neighborhood. After a month I was jogging two miles every other day. I watched my neighbor’s houses, came to know who left their garage doors open, who washed their cars weekly. I waved to people, and called out to the dogs. Soon I started alternating between jogging and sprinting. I read a book about training for distance running. That summer, I ran in a 10k race.

I tell you all of this because my change in attitude toward my physical well-being has been a drastic and ongoing devotion to revision; and some days when I see students react to some suggestion I’ve made for dramatic revision, I think of my father, and of how I responded to his good intentions. My first conclusion is the obvious one: that it’s nearly impossible to help someone improve at something he doesn’t want to do. This is why it’s so difficult to teach students in required composition classes to revise: many of them don’t want to write in the first place, they aren’t invested in the piece of writing they’ve completed, and when we tell them they need to revise they look at us as if we’ve just told them to run around the yard—or to take their seat on the Hindenburg.

My old hate/hate relationship with physical fitness might also illuminate a somewhat less obvious point: that almost any teaching, and certainly the teaching of revision, has to take into account not only the attitude but also the current ability of the student. To have given me that book on distance running when I was 10 years old would have had no positive effect; to buy me expensive running shoes would have been pointless.

That, too, might seem obvious, but it’s possible to make the mistake of asking our students to revise with a degree of thoroughness, or to require them to revise in a certain way, without first understanding their own attitude toward and ability to make revisions. And those are two different things.

A student’s attitude toward revision is largely the product of patience—or the lack of it—and ambition, or the lack of that.

A student’s ability to revise is something else. It involves, first, the student’s ability to stand back from his or her own work and to see it as another reader might—and, second, the student’s understanding of how to revise a given piece effectively. This last is both the hardest and the most important thing to teach, but I suspect we often make the mistake of trying to start there.

If the student writer has no interest in or ambition for the work, teaching revision is, if not pointless, doomed. (I’ll add here that “to get it published” is not a meaningful ambition for a piece of fiction or poetry. Thanks to the web, everything is publishable, from our favorite music mix to our diary entries. The simple fact that a piece of writing has been published probably hasn’t necessarily been evidence of high quality for, oh, 200 years, if it ever has; it certainly doesn’t mean anything now.) While we don’t usually have the same trouble teaching revision in creative writing classes that we do in required composition classes, there are some beginning writers who believe the first word that comes to mind is the best word, or that in encouraging revision we are asking them to turn the pure and natural landscape of the imagination into a prose equivalent of a strip mall. They want a nature preserve, while we argue for zoning. Or so they think.

The first step in discussing revision with any writer, then, is to identify—and, if necessary, adjust—his or her attitude toward revision. Of course, this is most effectively done not in the insistent manner of a drill sergeant, but in the supportive manner of a coach, or physical trainer. If a student has just written a 10—or 20, or 80—page story, and it’s the longest piece he’s ever written, and we give him a laundry list of things to revise, he’s likely to be annoyed, or frustrated—and he may simply be daunted by the scale of the task. Similarly, if a student has never written more than three drafts of any story, and we tell him to expect to write 15 or 20, he may run in the other direction. Because learning to revise is—like running—a process of developing stamina, or perseverance. A reasonable goal for one writing student may seem impossible to another. The first time I ran two miles, simply covering the distance was an accomplishment. Only with practice could I try to go faster. And—more to the point—only as I grew comfortable running that distance could I look around, and take note of what I saw, and think about my stride and breathing. The more students practice revision, the more comfortable they can become with using revision to explore a story, rather than to fix it.

A key to transforming the writer’s attitude toward revision is to help her to recognize her intention—not only why she is writing, but how or why she finds value in the particular piece at hand, and what she wants that piece of writing to communicate. (This same notion of intention could—should—be applied to a story’s parts—every scene, every page, every paragraph.)

Identifying the intention of a grocery list, or a job application, is simple. Identifying the intention of a particular story (or novel, or poem) can be more difficult, especially when, as is the case with most literary fiction, the work doesn’t mean to support a thesis, or tell the reader what to think. If the purpose of a story isn’t to deliver a message, and if it isn’t simply to execute a plot, what is its intention?

The intention of a story or poem can be considered in two ways: one is the intention of the work for the writer; the other is the intention of the work for the reader. These two things will always overlap, but they will rarely be identical.

For instance: the intention of a novel might be to argue against American intervention in Vietnam and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the impossibility of remaining neutral, even though to act is likely to cause harm. This is at least part of the intention of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The novel’s intention is not its plot, or sequence of events, or its romantic triangle; its intention is served by, among other things, that sequence of events, and those characters.

In that novel, Greene had another intention, one of more immediate interest to him than to the reader: rather than falling back on the sort of authoritative third person narrator he used most often, he wanted to continue to experiment with a dynamic, self-conscious, sometimes contradictory, other times ambivalent first person narrator. Thomas Fowler’s narrative is another crucial element of the book that serves Greene’s intention—but his interest in learning how to make the most of such a narrator was a private, technical matter. Ultimately, the effects the work means to create for the reader are what defines it; as writers, we must sacrifice or eliminate anything that interests us or intrigues us, pleases us or frustrates us, but fails to serve that ultimate intention.

So one way to teach revision is to help students to recognize and articulate their intentions. What interests you most about this story? What do you mean to explore or investigate? How do you want your reader to feel when she finishes reading? What do you want her to think about? (Eventually, of course, thorough revision involves asking those kinds of questions of every sentence.) A story or novel or poem is, after all, an attempt to make the reader think and feel, an attempt to communicate. And while nearly all of our students—like us—were once enchanted by stories they either read or heard, they may not have stepped out of their role as readers long enough to consider that the author set out to enchant them, and worked to weave a spell. Do they want to enchant their readers? To make them laugh? To make them feel the depth of a character’s despair? To lead them to reconsider their beliefs or attitudes? These are all general examples of a story’s intention for the reader.

The work’s intention for the writer would include all of those, but also goals the writer sets for himself: Maybe the student is trying to use the omniscient point of view for the first time, or trying to tell a story that covers the span of a character’s entire life; maybe he’s trying to avoid using the verb “to be” so often, or trying to vary sentence rhythm effectively; maybe he’s trying to tell a story in three acts, or to make sure that the story’s speaking characters have distinct voices. To encourage students to think about their work this way trains them to read as writers, and to consider the technical choices that make a story effective.

To put it another way: learning how to palm a playing card is the apprentice magician’s intention for himself; his intention for the viewer is to make the card disappear.

One of the most useful things a workshop, or we as teachers, can do for an apprentice writer is to reflect the intention of the work back to her. Far too often students, and even teachers, slip into a default mode of finding what’s wrong with a draft—or, just as bad, what’s right with it. It is of course helpful to give the writer suggestions for developing the work; and it’s useful for students to learn to diagnose the ailments of a draft that falls short. But falls short of what? If the conversation doesn’t begin by trying to recognize the work’s intention, there’s a great risk that the suggestions offered will be suggestions for ways to make the story what the speaker thinks it should be, or could be, or might be.

When I talk about a workshop describing a draft’s intentions, I don’t mean students should try to read the writer’s mind, or guess what she was thinking. Rather, students should describe what the pages they’ve been given appear to be trying to do—and they should support their conclusion with evidence from the text itself. Because unless this articulation of the work’s intention is done carefully, thoroughly, any criticism—or praise—of specific parts is irrelevant. While readers might agree that a particular description is “hysterical,” a particular scene “shocking,” a particular character “familiar,” it’s impossible to say whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing without having considered the work’s intention. For example: “So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past” is a world-class last line—for The Great Gatsby. It would be an awkward last line for Moby Dick, and it would be an absurd last line for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The comment “Great line!” is not useful without consideration of the context—which is to say, the work’s intentions.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but another reason it’s useful for readers to articulate the apparent intention of the work is so that the author can hear it. Ideally, the majority of readers will describe something like the intention the author had in mind. But often, due to the fact that work in progress is either insufficiently focused or not fully considered, different readers will have very different understandings of a work’s intention. This is good for the writer to know. And then there are the times when readers will be affected by the work in a way the writer hadn’t anticipated, but which seems worth pursuing. Our intention for a piece of writing isn’t stable; in fact, when we set out to write a first draft, we may have no clear intention in mind. As we revise, our intention may become more clear, but it is also likely to change, even drastically. Our goal, then, is to help the writer understand what a thoughtful reader sees on the page, and what other exciting opportunities the pages suggest.

It’s tempting to end by telling you that, this past year, I finally completed my first marathon—but all material has its limits. I can confirm, though, that the gene pool has a sense of humor. My son turns out to be a gifted athlete. His first love is soccer, a sport his grandfathers never played, but this past fall he was recruited to be the kicker and punter for his high school football team. He likes it, and he seems to be good at it. But my son is 6-foot-3 and weighs 150 pounds—on the football field, even in pads and a helmet, he looks likely to be snapped in half. So his coach assigned him to a special PE class for the varsity football team. The single intent, at least during the winter months, is for the players to get stronger, mostly by lifting weights. But after a week my son had hurt both his knees and one shoulder, and he began cutting class. One problem was that he didn’t know how to lift weights properly; another was that the primary motivational tools among the football players were mockery and ridicule.

My son complained about this to his goalkeeper coach (who happens to be a woman, but that’s another story). After his knees heeled, she took him to the YWCA. For two weeks she taught him how to lift weights properly—and she did it without ever putting weight on the bar. That is to say, she taught him technique. Without all of that weight bearing down on him—the metal weight, I mean, but also the weight of those older, stronger boys harassing him, and so without feeling forced to lift too much too soon—he learned what he needed to know.

This, I’ll suggest, is analogous to the difference between writing fiction with an emphasis on the product and learning craft. Elements of craft can be, and sometimes should be, learned in isolation. And so we offer students general exercises, and specific exercises related to their work in progress, and suggestions for revisions that focus on one element of craft, with no thought that the result will be the “final” draft. Because learning to write is not, after all, a race—or, if it is, it’s the sort of race that’s won, again and again, by the slow but steady.

* Well, their Triple A affiliate, but still. back to story »

** Which is not to say that identifying and fulfilling the intentions of apparently straightforward writing tasks is simple. See the prefatory note. back to story »