Worst Kept Secret in the English Department?
I wrote hundreds of pages this summer. I wrote every day. I rewrote, polished, revised, reconfigured, dressed up, dressed down, cut pasted pasted cut, threw out, shaped, modified, reworked, redreamed and did do over after do over. I have two favorite scenes in the whole stack of pages. And you know what? I wrote the mom-driving-the-truck-up-Orange scene in twenty minutes. And the looking-for-dad scene? Less than twenty. I wrote them in the minutes before class after not having slept at all.
Revision is key to good writing, it is. But we all know something else, too–don’t all of us know this? Sometimes great stuff comes out really fast and it’s perfect. One famous writer says there’s nothing more focusing, more key to writing well than having someone standing outside the door of your writing room, waiting for you. That’s how the writing classes I took this summer worked, that’s when I did the Two Great Scenes. I had to be in class at 9 am with writing to read to the group.
This might be the main reason to take writing classes. They focus you, they concentrate your vision. The other reason? I don’t know, always, when I need to apply the hundred gallons of pressure per square inch (revision) to a page, and when it’s truly good, done, shining. When I finish my writing for the day, I usually think both things are equally true: this is the worst writing on the planet and this is the best writing I have ever done. A class helps you know what you do that’s great. You learn, with that audience, when it’s flat, when it’s good, and that your own judgements about your own work are a) unreliable and b) necessary to learn more about.
Revision is interesting. It can improve your work. It can destroy your work. Most things I’ve published, I’ve revised seventeen or thirty or more times. But then, once a summer, there’s these gifts….these shining pieces breaking through.
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