Out of Context🪐

A process note + revision exercise

In honor of the leap year, I’m taking a leap and sharing a process note with you this week. It includes a revision exercise you can try on your own if you like.

Maybe it’s helpful to have a sense of my revision approach. Generally, I’m trying things out and seeing how they land. (Aren’t we all doing this in our own way whenever we write?) I think revision is like the portion of a vision test when the eye doctor swivels different strength lenses before your eyes and asks, “Better or worse?” In a revision scenario, I’m the doctor and the patient. Another challenge: the changes can be so subtle that it can be hard to know if lens A or B is better. I’ve always found this part of an eye exam super anxiety inducing because…What if I get it wrong? The nice thing about revision is you can always come back. (I suppose we can also return to the optometrist to have our prescriptions re-checked, but then we run the risk of another pupil dilation.)

Infinitely aglow, wandering the forests of revision in beady-eyed wonder.

What I Did
Recently, I pulled a paragraph from a stretch of pages that had been nagging me. Reading them felt like work. The kind of work that isn’t as interesting as, say, booking an annual checkup for my cat or ordering fragrance samples—aka doing something else. So I decided to dig deep in one place, rather than reading through and lamenting the whole stretch.

I didn’t overthink the paragraph I chose, just copied one from the middle-ish of the troubling stretch and pasted it into a fresh doc. Then I went sentence by sentence, writing a no-bullshit list of what was happening in this paragraph. I do this reverse outlining a lot. I’m very much into what I call “everything and the kitchen sink” writing. I tend to draft long and cut, shape, and rearrange later, rather than imposing constraints. A reverse outline helps me sort out what’s there and pull back from my ideas about what I think is happening; it helps me get real about what is actually on the page so I can more faithfully deliver on the terms I’ve set.

The Diagnosis; or, What I Noticed
The reverse outline revealed why it felt like such a slog to read that paragraph. There was so much noise. An overabundance of motion. This is just part of how I write—see earlier note about everything-and-the-kitchen-sink’ing it. So I wanted to pinpoint the moves I was making that had an overwhelming effect, which included:

• double, triple, quadruple(!) verbs in sentences

• events in rapid succession—action, action, action; beat-by-beat narration that reads like an instruction manual for what’s happening; helpful buttresses to write through, but falling short in the realm of lived-in, embodied confidence; a paragraph I saw before I felt it, which isn’t necessarily bad, but not where I like to leave things

• repetitive phrases where I’m trying to clarify or describe but really just need to make up my mind

What the paragraph needed was to slow down. I rewrote it with salvaged phrases from the original. I also pulled in another person, who had previously been hovering on the periphery of the scene, but didn’t really move. She finally had something to do and what she did revealed a glimpse of personality. It was a nice reminder that sometimes it’s helpful to use what’s on the page, instead of adding more. So I broke the constraint of working solely within this paragraph, but it worked out.

The paragraph on its own—removed from its original context, separate from my personal vision for what I thought was happening—freed me up to consider new possibilities.

Occasionally, I’ll write a reverse outline and find I’m kicking out walls, windows, doors. Sometimes the addition(s) becomes the thing. Working in a totally different doc split from the rest, I’m more likely to roam.

Of course, I’m glossing over how many ways I rewrote the paragraph before landing on the slightly better version. The point is: it reads less rushed. And though I didn’t rewrite all the pages that felt like such a slog to read, I did something, which is better than nothing. Now, in the middle of these cursed pages, there’s some improvement, a reminder that I’ve dug in before and can do it again. Everything else now has to rise to this paragraph’s level. Working from the middle is a nice trick I play on myself in order to steer away from the temptation to obsess over the beginning or ending and neglect the middle. (Sometime I’ll tell you all about revising a novel from the middle to the end and the middle to the beginning, which is one of the stranger revision strategies I’ve tried; let’s call it a mistake I made so you don’t have to!)

Portrait of author realizing she must tend to every paragraph surrounding the single paragraph she revised.

There’s still work to do here, but I’m very much of the “don’t try to fix it all at once” mindset. Choosing one thing I want to tend makes it possible to fully address on that one thing.

I’m also trying to push my revision attitude beyond the productivity mindset that shapes many of my other waking hours. Trying to stop asking: “If I do this enough will I have better impulses?” and “Will I always be cleaning up my messes?” Trying to focus less on exorcising the excess and more on working with it.

I’m trying to think of revision more as a mode of outliving the earlier stages of transmission; as an opportunity to translate what appears on the page and go after something else—a whale whose shape I don’t know because it’s different every time I come back, different for each piece, different for each round of revision. Maybe it’s not even a whale. 🐈‍⬛

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Freaky freeze-thaw dynamics.

Try It:
Select a piece of writing you’re hemming and hawing over. Copy + paste a paragraph from that piece into a fresh doc. If you’re having a tough time picking a paragraph, aim for one some place in the middle. (I usually work from the knowledge that I often toil over beginnings and endings, but the middle falls slack. So I’ll frequently choose a paragraph from the middle-ish of a piece and dig in there.)

Reverse outline what is happening in that paragraph. Go sentence by sentence to sketch the most basic, straightforward description of what is going down in this paragraph—and this paragraph alone.

Rewrite the paragraph with your skeletal outline in mind. Fine if you keep a few of your darlings. Fine if you break the boundaries of this paragraph and pull in something from another that previously felt like a set piece. I find constraints helpful for focusing and breaking out of a rut. Yet it’s usually when I deviate from the path that I feel like I’m getting somewhere. Keep it as rigid or loose as you find helpful.

Try the exercise or save it for a rainy day. Feel free to share in the comments how it went for you. I’d love to hear about your wins, what tripped you up, and the possum meme which most accurately describes your experience of the process.

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Lemmy Recommends: Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino; reverse outlining as a revision strategy; a Nicolas Cage movie marathon; Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack to Mandy; basking in the snowdrops.