What is the difference between revising and editing?
Here at the garret, I’ve been trying all week to make myself write the blurb for my book of essays based on last year’s newsletters. The manuscript is back from the proofreader and I’ve got a cover designer lined up, so it’s the damn blurb that is standing between me and the next steps for the book. I routinely edit blurbs for my clients and sometimes even write them from scratch. That work is hard but not as hard as writing the blurb for my own book. I now have even more empathy for authors staring down that task. But it must be done.
This is also true of revision. It’s a hard task. It’s going to be mentally taxing. If you are doing it right, you are probably going to make your book worse before you make it better. You might get lost along the way or feel like quitting. Revision is the dark-wood-wandering stage of the writing process.
One mistake I sometimes see writers make when we workshop chapters together after their content edit is to play it too safe. Rather than making a big, hard change (like choosing a more dynamic opening scene), they will make a bunch of smaller, easier changes (like dressing up their too-static original scene with more dynamic verbs and better description). What they are doing is editing rather than revising. They are staying up on the grassy green hill, surveying that dark wood of revision, reluctant to enter.
Bernard Malamud, asked by an interviewer how many drafts of a novel he typically completed, replied, “Many more than I call three.” Sometimes, when you are wandering in the wood, you lose the exact count. His further explanation shows his progression from revision to editing: “Usually the last of the first puts it in place. The second focuses, develops, subtilizes. By the third most of the dross is gone. I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.” It’s only in his third-ish draft that Malamud turns to the detail work of editing. Everything before that is revision.
Because we’re word nerds here, let’s go see what Merriam-Webster has to say. The word revise means “to look over again in order to correct or improve” or “to make a new, amended, improved, or up-to-date version.” It’s a much older word than edit, dating back to the sixteenth century, and derives from the Latin rivisere, to look at again. Edit, in contrast, emerged only in the late eighteenth century as a back-formation from the word editor, and is strongly associated with publishing: “to prepare (something, such as literary material) for publication or public presentation” or “to alter, adapt, or refine especially to bring about conformity to a standard or to suit a particular purpose.” The key words for revision: look and new. The key words for editing: prepare and refine.
My work this week provides a useful example of the differences between revising and editing. I completed a manuscript evaluation for an author with a promising but unfinished draft of a romance novel. She had a vibrant, funny opening set-up for her main characters; she knew the ending—happy ever after with all the trimmings; and she knew that her characters needed to grow and change over the course of the novel in order for that ending to be believable. But she had gotten stuck in what Chuck Wendig calls “the mushy middle” because she hadn’t clarified for herself why one of her main characters was the way he was and what was going to motivate him to change. She needed to step back from the details of her novel in order to look again at the larger structure and see the logical gaps she needed to fill in. Now that she’s done so, she needs to create new scenes to bridge those gaps. Revise = look > new.
The other project I worked on this week was a copyedit for a complex first-in-series fantasy novel. This author did a content edit with me last year, and I have been blown away by the depth and breadth of her revisions. I was already familiar with her changes to the opening of the novel and the main protagonist’s character arc since we worked through those together after her content edit. I had also gotten glimpses of a couple new narrative threads she planned to weave into the story, but I was unprepared for their richness and resonance, as well as for the overall elevation of her writing voice, which has gained confidence and beauty over the course of her work. This author revised and edited, and now my job is to help her do a final polish. I’m flagging open story questions so I can make sure they are all closed by the end of the book. We’re discussing which terms in her story world should be capitalized. I’m creating a detailed style sheet tracking characters, place names, languages, and timelines so we can make sure everything is consistent, in this book and in future books in the series. Edit = prepare + refine.
I’ll be back next week with another post that will help you navigate the dark wood of revision. But for now, just contemplate it. Get used to the idea of stepping into the wood. What will it feel like? What will it smell like? What will you discover inside? Malumud’s “flowers of afterthought”? Some magic mushrooms? Fluorescent lichens? A snub-nosed monkey? The wood is wondrous and strange and full of inspiration.
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