Thursday, February 24, 2005

On the fine art of revision (or, on the fine revision of art?)

An interview with the self, Part One of ?

Q: First question. You write fiction, where revision has an obvious role to play. Why should non-writers care about, or think about, the idea of revision? What relevance does revision have in contemporary society?

A: I think--well, I'm afraid I'm going to get all gooey mumbo-jumbo pseudo-philosophic on this one, which isn't my intention, so please forgive me if my words stray that way. But to look at revision from a broad perspective, I think it's helpful to note that, were I the type of person to be quoted, one of the things I might want to be quoted as saying is this: "There's only two things I firmly believe in; one is that freedom of speech is crucial for society to function, the other is that firm beliefs aren't very good things to have."

That's really a sort of nutshell vision of my philosophy of life, and I like to think that if lots of other people would pick up on that, the world would be a better place for it. To expand on this idea--I think one of the big problems society faces right now is its sort of, dependence? Reliance? Something, on firm beliefs. I think there's a tendency to want to have things firmly designated. Good, bad. Us, them. Pro-life, pro-choice. Whatever it is, we want to have the answers, and we want the answers to be right, so that other answers can be wrong.

I'm really broadly generalizing here. Me, my life, I try not to see things that way. It is true that I firmly believe in the right to free speech--but that's the underpinning that could make great dialogue possible, for those who choose to run with it. And it's a lot like writing a piece of fiction in that, the first draft usually isn't the best. That's why we revise our drafts. Revision shouldn't implicate lots of random change for change sake--if I'm writing a crime novel I shouldn't have to revise it into a romance just to see if that would be better. But I should be free--well, I am free, because nobody's keeping score on my laptop--to, you know, rearrange stuff. Find ways for things to sound better or move better. And I think that's how society should, could, work. Unfortunately I think the last presidential election shows that maybe things aren't that way right now. You could look at the two candidates and say, one's up for firm decisiveness while the other's out there for a more reasoned, progressive approach. Where by progressive I really mean, everything can be or should be an act of progression. Or change, towards something better. Of course I'm no expert on either candidate or on politics in general, so don't see this as a. Well, you know. It's actually one of my nightmares, that someday, I'll be talking, and people will be listening, and what I'll say at one point will be attributed to me, and then later when I say something different it'll all be "Oh hey wow whoa change!" Like, to go back one second? The flip flopping? Come on, what was that all about? Since when was changing your mind a bad thing?

Look at Cleveland, for an example. I think Cleveland's this city that's gotten a bad rap and now it's really falling apart. We're getting dumped on with crazy ideas from the local government--raising money for the city by installing stop light ticket cameras, or casino gambling, say. We're also getting the shaft from the boys upstairs. NASA budget cuts mean we're likely to lose 700 local jobs in the next year. Not janitor type jobs but thinking jobs, bright people jobs. I hate the buzz phrase "brain drain" but there you have it. Cleveland's a city in a bad need of some serious revision--we've got a great draft of a city here, there's lots of stuff to work with, but you have to work with it to get out of it what can really be there to be found. I'm not convinced the current Cleveland leadership is the best we could get for this sort of work. I want to see ideas coming out of city hall, but if the best ideas there are right now are stop light cameras and casinos, well. Maybe they're fine examples, I don't know. I'm not a poltician for probably very good reasons. But I think there's better ideas to be had--like, maybe, fighting tooth and nail for every single job that might be lost at NASA. NASA right there is a great base to work from--but, again, it must be worked with.

Anyways, I'm rambling. Point is, I think revision as a conscious act is something that maybe there isn't enough receptiveness to on the part of our society, and I'd love to see that changed. Of course, I could be completely wrong on this, so don't quote me on it. [grin]

Q: Okay, next question. Why the faux self-interview posing for this--and presumably for the follow-up--posts?

A: Uhm. Seemed like a fun idea during the car ride home? [grin] Plus I think it will work well with something I've been thinking of doing with this web page--namely, returning to ideas repeatedly, re-evaluating them from different angles, that sort of thing. I've already got it all planned out in my head. Next post's opening question will be something like "Last time, you said" and the answer can be a reassessment of the original idea. Plus, I feel like I'm working towards some kind of big point at the end of this, though I don't know what it is, and my thoughts are all scattered on the subject right now, so this seemed like a sort of fun Platonic sort of way to work through the mess in my head to figure out what I'm thinking about. And maybe spark discussion along the way too. I like discussion. Plus this format probably lends itself better to rambling which frees me up to just kind of see where things go. Oddly enough, I'm not revising this interview much as I go. But then, I--and I imagine many others--feel more comfortable writing for the web that way. Which is funny, since, well. I'd had this conceit at the beginning og this blog that everything I wrote was going to be finely-revised sharp text, but I think I'm starting to see the error of that. There's no time for it. The real revision should be saved for my real writing. Real in quotation marks, I guess. Or maybe it's just because I read the Dave Eggers interview over at the Onion A.V. Club today and it's got me thinking meta a bit more than usual.

Q: Fantastic picture at the top of the interview, isn't it?

A: You're telling me. I once got briefly mistaken for Eggers outside a bookstore over in Shaker Heights, and it was one of the best moments ever. If I knew I could look like him when I cut my hair short, I'd do it in a second. He just looks happy. Pleasantly confused, perhaps. In a good way.

Q: Okay, on to the topic at hand. Revision. To give us a base to work off of--could you maybe loosely define revision?

A: You weren't much paying attention to my answer to the first question, were you. [grin] Reivision, right now, to me, is the act of taking a draft of a story, or a novel, or something, and making it better.

Q: Let's work through that definition piece by piece. You say revision is an act. What do you mean by that?

A: Well...revision is really an action. It's a series of actions all sort of bundled up into this act of being the guy in the corner of the coffee shop who's alternately staring off into space, or bashing furiously at the keyboard. It might help to note that for me writing is really about two stages, at least the way I've been working lately, the last few years. It's about writing, and it's about revision. Writing is sort of the brain-storming session, the spitting out of sentences just to see if they stick. To see if throwing one sentence up on the screen will cause another one to need to follow it. To find out where the story itself could actually go. Revision happens after the writing is done--or, depending, it happens partway through the writing, say, if the first half's written there might be revision of that which will extend forward into more writing towards the ending of the story. They're not sharply defined activities but they're still defined. Maybe not a sharp line between the two but there's definitely a, I don't know, a visible cloudy column of space?

So revision as action--it's about sitting down. It's about drinking coffee. It's about using the arrow keys a lot, moving around, knowing a few basic keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste and move text around on the screen. It's about the backspace key, a lot. But it's also about mental action. Activity. It's about listening to the sounds of sentences inside my head and figuring out, how can these sentences actually be made to sound better? Can this paragraph benefit from a more abstract or concrete approach? Is this event as necessary as I thought it was when I first wrote it? That's always a tough one. There's a story I'm working on now which requires a bit of an elision, and I'm still wondering if it's really required or if that's just me being lazy. I still suspect the elision is best for this story--the stuff that gets elided is probably an entirely separate story unto itself, but I guess we can talk about that more later.

Uhm. I guess for now you might call the "act" at the core of revision that of the "question". It's about questions. Making choices. And having the freedom to change those choices as much as possible. But, not infinitely. But I imagine we'll get to the "How do you know you're done?" issue later on, huh?

Q: I think so. Meanwhiles, I think it's past your bed time.

A: This is true. This is true.

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