What Makes Revision So Hard?

There is no shortage of craft books, poetry guides, artist’s manuals, and Substack thinkpieces articulating the power of poetic revision. Everyone, myself included, thinks they have something wise to impart about the process of shaping sand into sandcastles, clay into sculptures, or whatever analogy you want to represent the act of revision.

Still, none of it prepares you for how painful it can be.

My primary experience with revision is in poetry, but rest assured that the advice here applies to both poets and prose writers. 

I have been working on, abandoning, and revisiting a poetry collection for years. If it gets published, it will probably be called Transmogrifications. The spark for Transmogrifications began in college, and the work has transformed alongside my own developing ideas about what the poems ought to accomplish.

At times, I’ve felt that I should just stop working on it altogether: the version of myself that started this collection is unrecognizable to the person I am today, so what reason do I have for finishing that person’s work? Can’t I just focus on new and better poems?

Except I’m wrong about that: the person who wrote those poems so many years ago is still me. And my desire to abandon the project is really an avoidance of the pain of revision. But why does revision hurt so much?

Writing and Selfhood

For years now, I’ve been contending with the idea that poems, prose, or simply art in general are all representations of one’s innermost self.

The debate around this concept isn’t new. Ryan Ruby’s illuminating (if overwhelming) poem-as-criticism Context Collapse articulates some of the history: throughout the 20th century, poets were “incentivized to develop / A trademark ‘voice’ or ‘style'”… “Depending on whether the preferred self- / conception is that of inspired bard / or impersonal craftsman.”

In more familiar terms, if a poet’s work is that of the “impersonal craftsman”—deliberating consciously between different devices, decisions, and modes of poetic production—then what they hone is “style.” If they are an “inspired bard,” something about the work is more representative of the poet’s own soul; “voice” would be the closest word for this.

Charles Bernstein, a poet and literary critic, would track this binary to what he calls the tension between mid-century America’s “official verse culture” and the avant-garde. The former might describe Confessional Poets, whose blistering excavations of self-representation were attempts to showcase the totality of one’s complicated selfhood on the page; the latter is something Bernstein’s work might bucket under.

Of course, these are binaries, which lack capacity for nuance. Most writers, myself included, work within both registers: voice and style each have a place in poetic thought.

Nonetheless, no matter how heady I try to be—no matter how much I would prefer to be the avant-garde stylist, the impersonal craftsman—my inner inspired bard keeps getting in the way of revision. Revising Transmogrifications should feel like molding and shaping clay, except the clay stares back at me with my own face, and it has already hardened into something more ceramic.

The Mistake of Familiarity

So, is it the truth that these poems are avatars of my selfhood? Is that just a fantastic ego production?

It’s possibly both, possibly neither. But it doesn’t help that, when I get so familiar with my own work, that familiarity makes the work feel like an extension of me.  

Part of what makes revision difficult for me is that I struggle to envision new possibilities for the work. The struggle comes from a feeling that the poem is more or less “done.” Rereading the same words over and over gives them an air of authority: those words have been in that order for so long that obviously they’re the right ones. (Even worse is when a literary journal has already published the poem, cementing its “finished” status in my brain. One editor liked it, so it must be ready for the collection, right?)

Case in point, the hardest poems for me to revise are, ironically, the oldest ones in the manuscript. You would think the easiest poems to revise or remove are the oldest ones, given that my own poetics have evolved so much. But when I read those poems and try to find new doorways, I default to the same mind, the same ego, the same way of seeing things.

What I’m Trying to Do Instead…

I have no idea how any of this article will land for you. Your troubles with revision might be completely different from mine. Or, maybe you’re a 21st century Frank O’Hara, whipping out first drafts and shoving them in a drawer until you’re ready to put a book together.

In any case, the work of revision (whose etymology, “seeing again,” really offers a ton of clues) is not easy. So, here are a few tricks I’m using to try to get around the above predicaments. Maybe they’ll work for you too?

1. Edit in Persona

What if none of your poems/stories/essays are written in your voice?

Whether you write in persona or don’t, a trick I’m trying to use is seeing the speaker of the work as being some sort of separate, other entity, whose life story may or may not at least partially align with mine. It’s true, anyway, that no single poem can contain the totality of your selfhood: every poem bears facets of yourself (or even discovers them), but is not made up of your entirety.

For prose writers, this would of course be the narrator instead of the speaker. Fiction writers have an easier time of doing this than essayists, but if your fiction is hard to revise, I think the same advice applies. 

Is it working for me: A little bit? I keep having to remind myself of this idea while I’m revising. I’m also trying to read my poems in a voice that isn’t the voice in my head. I tried Morgan Freeman’s voice, which is quite iconic, but it didn’t work, because I can’t see him writing the poems I’m writing.

2. Force a Piece Into New Form

If you know you need to revise a poem or piece, but have no idea what to do with it, spin a wheel, pick a form, see what happens.

To be clear, the point is not to pick the right form (although it’s great when this happens). Rather, the point is to see what happens when you force language into unusual circumstances. It would be difficult, for example, to turn a sestina into a sonnet, or make a contrapuntal out of a cinquain. You will need to add and subtract and keep rearranging. But that process could yield tons of insight, new and improved lines, or else some kind of direction towards that better form. Or maybe you stick with the original form and end up with better words.

For prose writers, there are plenty of configurations in story structure you can try. What if your novella was actually a flash fiction piece? Or your braided essay is actually a lyric essay or a hermit crab essay? 

Is it working for me: Kind of! I managed to turn a free verse poem into a pantoum. I can’t decide yet if the new form is successful, but I did learn a lot about the poem by forcing it into a new shape.

3. Lop Off the Beginning and End

What do you have when you remove the first and last lines? 

The opening line is your doorway into the poem or piece; the last lines often end somewhere in the realm of insight, epiphany, or maybe a punchline.

If your piece works without the opening lines, perhaps it is no longer relevant to the final result of the work. If your piece works without the final lines, perhaps its insight happened elsewhere—or, perhaps it hasn’t happened yet.

Alternately, you can remove the first and last 3 lines of your piece and try to rewrite them without repeating any of the same words. Just to see what happens.

Is it working for me: Yes and no… I managed to make a poem much better by completely changing the final 3 lines, but now the first 5 lines don’t sit right with me. Sometimes, revision feels like I’m playing whack-a-mole.

For more on revision (for all genres), check out our article here:

Revising and Editing for Creative Writers