Revisioning Revisions

Revisions are, in my opinion, the hardest part of being a writer. For myself, there are three reasons for this. The most honest one being that I'm lazy. Even though I love writing and it's what I want to do with my life, I still struggle with the motivation to rewrite. There's this sense that it's already done, I've already written it, so revision should be easy and simple and I can put it off. But this is absolutely not true. Revisions can be even more difficult than the first time around. I think this is because of reasons two and three. Two being, someone's writing can become too precious to people. I've experienced this myself where I'll write a line that doesn't fit within the piece, but it's otherwise beautiful and resonate. Becoming attached to a line or plot can become difficult because it'll prevent you from revising. The last reason people tend to get caught up in revising is that they don't really know how to revise and worry about "ruining" their piece. Revisions are about exploration, about trying things even if they seem a little out-of-the-box. For a revision of a story, I once changed the entire point of view. Even though that didn't work in the story, at least I tried it and it ended up helping with some wonky sentences.

Over the course of this week, I really tried to think about revisions and what they could do for my poems. I tried a handful of things to see what would help and what would hurt my work. For one day I took five of my favorite haiku poems and made sure they actually fit the 5-7-5 syllable count. For another poem I completely dropped a whole stanza. I worked for nearly two days on my sestina, fixing the second half of the poem. In one of my ekphrasis poems, there was a line that I really liked, but it didn't work in the poem. I tried to get around removing the line by rewriting it over a few times, but in the end I reminded myself not to let anything be too precious--and I took it out. To go all-out, for one poem I decided to only leave one line the same and change all the rest. Overall, I think that while some of the revisions were for the best, others were just for exploration.

Thanks for reading and, please, come back next week where I will be reporting on writing a horror story.

#poetry #revisions