Lately, I’ve been revising a novel.

What does that mean? 

It means facing down a huge gnarly manuscript that’s been sitting, unloved, in a corner of your office since the triumphant moment you cried, “Thank God, it’s done!”

(Translation: I can’t stand to work on this stinking story for one more second.)

Of course, stories are never done. Novelists are famous tinkerers. One of my favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, felt that a story was never really finished, but instead merely left alone.

Part of the problem with leaving a story alone, especially a long one like a novel, is that the writer himself is a different person by the time he reaches the end. Writing a novel can take years (at least for me it does). Ask yourself: am I the same person I was three years ago? Have my tastes changed at all? Have I learned anything crucial about life, death, friendship, love, marriage, parenting, or politics in that time?

The honest answer is, “Yes, of course.”

But what do you do with this newfound wisdom? The impulse is to try to build it into your story. Sometimes, it works. But just as often, your story will arrogantly resist. If you’ve done it right, it has a life of its own. And just like a headstrong child, it will reject too much parental tampering. 

I’ve heard consciousness described as a kind of river. And it’s true that one never steps into the same river twice. Unfortunately, a novel is a confined stretch of that river, with a beginning, middle, and an end. If there were no way to leave it be when it was finished, then writers would be doomed to write a single novel in a lifetime.

Which is essentially what Marcel Proust decided to do with his gigantic, six volume project, In Search of Lost Time. Then again, the whole point of that novel was to recreate the entire river, not any one stretch of it.

I used to hate revising. Even the suggestion of revising. This is mostly, but not exclusively, a male phenomenon, I’ve been told, something about the confluence of testosterone and a keyboard. When I was done with a story, it was DONE. All of the hard work it had taken to get that story into its final shape was, well…hard. Stories weren’t so much written, I used to feel, as revealed.

Yes, it doesn’t hurt to have a messianic sense of the self if you’re going to be putting it all out there for the world to judge.

Of course, what was really behind my famous resistance to revise was something like fear: fear of reopening a story and finding…what? That it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I thought it was. That it was, in fact, downright bad. That it needed a lot more work, much more than I could muster, since I was already bored of it. That it was derivative. That it was original, but incomprehensible. That it was incomprehensible, but not in that really great literary way. That it was neither great nor literary.

You get the picture.

Writing fiction is largely the business of staring one’s self down. Certain mantras are helpful. One of the best is, “It’s never as good – or as bad — as you think.”

The process can be punishing. One week you’re up; the next you’re down. Much of the work is simply to stay balanced, to weather the inevitable highs — “This is pure genius!— ” and the lows — “I would rather scoop out my kidneys with a dull spoon than touch that manuscript.”

Over time, I’ve warmed to the revision process. After all, a revision is a “do-over,” a rare second chance to make something better. And the truth is, no matter how good the writing is, there’s always room for improvement. A sentence that struck you, seven or eight months ago, as the height of understated brilliance, such as, “He sneezed and looked out the window,” or, “Would it ever be morning again?” might, on closer examination, need a bit of sprucing up.

At the other end of the spectrum, that amazing nine-sentence-long metaphor, the one that locks everything together and lays bare the ultimate secrets of the universe, might –just maybe, I’m just spit-balling here — be slightly too much weight for a fragile paragraph to bear.

Revisions can be small or large, an improved choice of words or the killing-off of a major character. The trick is to wade out into that old familiar stretch of river, to see it clearly for what it is, and…

On second thought, strike that analogy.  

Too clunky.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 January 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com