These last few months, I have been busily working on material for Scratch, a digital magazine I’m launching this fall with Manjula Martin. (I’ll be ready to tell you more in a couple weeks.)
I have spent more time rewriting my work than writing it, which I expected. Or, I believe the old adage is true: “Writing is rewriting.”
In his essay for Glimmer Train, Phil Tate discusses a valuable lesson of rewriting, or revision:
Willful expansion adds stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is not, and forcing myself to cut deeply—not only when it was good enough but when it was good—made a stronger, more tightly focused story.
Read Tate’s full essay here. (And stay tuned to Scratch here.)
Other pieces from Glimmer Train this month:
- On Being Not a Writer by Xhenet Aliu
- A Picture and a Thousand Words by Carrie Brown
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
Jane, I am eager to learn more about Scratch. Among my memorable moments was when a Kansas City Star editor phoned me about an article I had submitted for publication and told me, “Let me start by saying you write very well.” He went on to say he had learned in journalism school that “…what you leave out is as important as what you leave in.”
I am glad to have lived long enough to experience the age of the Internet. Since my blog, A 1961-1965 Park College Diary is, at this time, merely a transcription of the diary entries I wrote then, I get my writing practice by leaving comments on other people’s blogs.
I love the way words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs can be shortened, moved around, expanded or deleted.on the screen in front of me. Having experienced manuscript submitting in the age of onion skin second copies, carbon paper, typewriter erasers and eventually correction fluid, I recall many instances when I let a less than desirable word, phrase, sentence or paragraph stay since it was too much trouble to change it.
I also appreciate the way “my” cursor serves as a proofreading tool.
All I can say is that I feel lucky to have come of age when word processing was part of every school and office!
Kenzaburoi Oe wrote a pretty famous essay titled “Keshigomu de kaku” — writing with an eraser. 🙂
While revision is important, I just want to note that not everyone agrees that cutting is the heart of revision. Fitzgerald famously said that writers were either putter-inners or taker-outers, and while he clearly favored the latter, not everyone did. Among others, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, and Melville were all likely putter-inners. Not bad company.
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