Revision? Fine! But: is it Art?

An interview with the self, Part Two of ?. Read the (mostly unrelated) Part One here.

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Q: But his aren't the types of books you really want to write, are they?

A: Uhm. Beg your pardon?

Q: Stephen Dixon's books. You wouldn't honestly want to reproduce them, now, would you?

A: Come again?

Q: Ahem! Your last few posts have referred to Stephen Dixon, and how you're currently reading his novel Frog--or, at least, how you're supposed to be reading the book, when you're not getting yourself distracted with the frivolous act of tinkering with style sheets and blog layouts--

A: Er, oh, oh. Wait. You can't do that.

Q: Do what?

A: Refer to posts from the blog outside of the interview series. I walked in here thinking you were going to pick up where we last left off--working our way through the definition of revision I offered near the end of the previous interview segment. Allow me to quote the segment in question:

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.

And then you asked me to break that up into pieces and I went on to talk about the act or actions-ness-based nature of revision. Revision as an act that is.

Q: Oh, right.

A: But lucky for you I don't want to pick up there right now. It was probably a silly idea anyways. What I really want to talk about is the story I'm working on right now. And how the revision of it is sucking my soul out through my eyeballs and bouncing it across the table like old silly putty.

Q: Bugger you. Who's conducting the interview?

A: Did we use that gag last time? I can't recall.

Q: Screw off. Talk about your story. It's you're bloody damned forum anyways. Don't know why you had to bring me into it just to cut me out of it.

A: Tension, my friend, tension! Readers dig tension and since I haven't got the urge to go out and disagree with lots of people out there--

Q: You've done that once, a few posts ago. Something about some other blog and slush piles.

A: --right and it made me feel very bad afterwards. So, tension. You. Me. Us. This "I" that is we.

Q: I find this all very depressing.

A: That's cool. So this story I'm working on now, it's in the heavy revision stage. Which is to say, it's changing a lot. It's kind of weird. Ask me about that.

Q: Insert insightful question here.

A: Don't pout. This story, it's been a weird one. As you might know I'm working on a loosely collected or connected chain of stories, one influencing the next and so forth, I could draw a really pretty Venn diagram of the ways they overlap, the three completed stories and the fourth current draft-form story. Actually today I realized there's a character who appeared as a random piece of fluff in the second story who has now appeared in some form in each of the two stories that's followed. Well, appeared, being a relative thing. She only gets a speaking part in story number three and she's dead before they all begin.

Q: That's kind of depressing.

A: I know, but she's got a lot of life in here, but I think after this story, if and or when I ever finish it, I'm really going to have to put her to rest for good. In peace, I hope. Though, not so much. She's really troubled a lot of people by living and dying, the way she did. But that's not the point: the point is, the previous two stories to the one I'm working on, they plotted out very nicely. They were an odd mix of character and plot based stories, which shouldn't be so odd a mix, but anyways that's something I've been thinking about lately since I was prompted by a friend towards the issue, and there's a whole post about that to come--

Q: You say that a lot.

A: This is true.

Q: You'll never do them.

A: Probably not.

Q: And if you do, leave me out of the plot versus character one, because it sounds dreadfully dull.

A: Well, no. It's not.

Q: Bugger.

A: Anyways. This story, it's not plotting out so easy. I think it tips towards the character-driven end of the spectrum, but there's a lot of things that still happen, still. It's not the type of story where someone sits in a coffee shop and lots of things happen inside their head. It--

Q: From what I've seen it seems like a story where a character sits in a bank and a lot of things happen inside his head.

A: Hush. He's thinking a lot about things that happen. Have happened.

Q: See also, that memory versus current events post you're meaning to write.

A: Right. Anyways point being. I wrote a lot of stuff for this story and it got rather long, it was maybe 6500 words or so, which is longer than the previous two stories combined, and I just hit this point yesterday, well, I fully realized a point that I've been hitting the last week or so--I just don't know how to end it. I don't know what happens in the right-now that brings all this stuff together. Like, it's some kind of revelation, or a direction the character's about to go in, but I haven't got it yet. And

Q: ...

A: ...

Q: Allo?

A: ...

Q: What the fuck.

A: ... Sorry. Pizza came. Can we continue this later? I'm dreadfully hungry and this has been long enough as is.

Q: Just wrap up your last point.

A: Okay point is I got this story full of stuff and now, just now, tonight, I gave it a major face-lift. I took everything and rearranged the order things happen in. I...sorry, dreadfully good pizza.

Q: Is that italian sausage? Girlfriend must be out of town tonight, huh.

A: Shut the hell...yes, you're right. Anyways I even took something from later in the story and made it the first paragraph because I think it might have the most damning final line of a paragraph in the entire story so far. And I think maybe it just opens things in a more creative or attention-grabbing way, more of an up-note before all the depressing downer-notes that follow. And what's funny is I usually resist this kind of thing. I mean, I do revise everything heavily, but I tend to get stuck on certain things. Like once I write an opening paragraph though it gets edited a lot in practice it's still the same thing, same idea underneath; the same plot element or idea or whatever is there just in different, better words.

Q: Right.

A: But this time I've been forced to see that the story's stuck somewhere and I think maybe the ending is actually in what's already there, buried up near the front where it might be losing out on the impact it could have, when it follows the rest of the story, and has all that other stuff leading up to it. Which required a new opening, based on something later in the story, and...see, I don't want to pat myself on the back yet, but it feels good, like this is what I'm supposed to do. And there's always that fear that what you had was actually right and what you're doing when you revise is wrong, and that's why we save different versions of the file before crucial changes like these, and--

Q: Hold up. Is that fucking Josie and the Pussycats in your playlist, playing right now?

A: No. It's Kay Hanley. Her solo album. It's good.

Q: And she--

A: Shut up. Shut up. Point being: maybe I had a breakthrough tonight or maybe I ruined everything I've done. But I'm challenging myself and I'm trying to make it better, and if that's not the heart of revision then what is?

Q: ...

A: ...

Q: Poser.