This final week is a departure. I have reserved it exclusively for revision. The kind of revision I’m asking you to do is not just line-level copyediting. It’s a wholescale re-seeing. This will require you to re-read everything you’ve written during the last nine weeks and pick the two things that you most want to continue working with. That re-reading and selection process is your pre-writing for this week. Then your prompts are, of course, the revisions themselves.
There are lots of revision strategies I use. Most are very simple. You can just freestyle it, of course. Just go in with an attitude of “making it better,” and seeing what that yields. It often helps, though, to have a specific strategy in mind.
While I’ve already suggested that real revision goes beyond the line level, I have found that it often starts there. Line-level tinkering tends to be a good gateway to larger revisions. To that end, you can go through a piece of writing and simply remove all the adjectives and adverbs. Despite what your fifth grade teacher told you, adjectives and adverbs are not the best words to use in describing something. They tend to be abstract, and they often mask inactive nouns and verbs. Good description — good writing, generally — is built on good, active nouns and verbs. If you choose the right ones, you don’t need to modify them.
You can also go through a piece of writing and remove all parentheticals. This is a particular bugaboo of mine (as you may have noticed by now). Again, this strategy makes the writing more active. It forces you to make clearer, more direct assertions. In short, it forces you to decide what you really think.
Another simple but profound revision strategy is to change the verb tense and/or point of view. This is a particularly useful strategy for narrative writing. It subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) shifts perspective on the events in question, and that can lead to new insights, new lines of thought.
For the purposes of this exercise, I have chosen another set of strategies. They’re very simple too, but they’re somewhat less subtle than the strategies I’ve already listed. These last two strategies tend to be my go-to, “when in doubt” strategies because they really do produce vastly different versions from the original. The first is to cut the number of words in a piece of writing by half, and the second is to double the number of words you’ve written. I take that assignment literally: I count the exact number of words in the original and divide or multiply by two. The revision has to have that exact number of words.
I have applied those strategies to two things I wrote for this nine-week period: the weird little “travelogue” to Stanley Kubrick’s house and my other “travel” essay, “Paradise Lost,” which was the longest piece I wrote in the nine-weeks, and it felt a little rudderless to me. I have also provided a short commentary to each revision — a post mortem where I hash out what I was thinking during the revision process and reveal which version (the original or the revision) I prefer and whether I think I’m done.
Here they are: