Greetings, my creative fellow travelers,
It is Sunday afternoon (update: now Monday) as I work on this edition, and the thought marching in circles on the street below my office window, waving handmade signs and shouting in a megaphone, is:
“You’re running out of time.”
Easy for them to say. Them being some small part of me. But I’m the one who has to make policy decisions. And while I empathize with the protesters, the single-mindedness of “you’re running out of time” (like “time flies” and other simplistic reflections) fails to embrace the totality of the situation.
There are emotions to this time crunch that the phrase doesn’t do justice to. Anxiety knowing less than two days (now one) remain until I send this letter. Yearning to send something worth your while. Uncertainty whether I will succeed. Frustration at how often I experience self-doubt. And finally (not really, but we need to move on) shame and impatience about my difficulty identifying when I have achieved success.
Other parts of my inner congress are preoccupied with material facts. Hearings concerning what counted as procrastination last week and what constructively contributed to this letter. A committee determining how many gallons of effort translate to one mile of progress. And a slew of representatives locked in a conference room debating which of the ideas in this newsletter are not flawed, underdeveloped, or commonplace.
Bless the independents, who constantly interrupt everyone else to campaign for fun, rest, exercise, and other niche causes.
Soliciting Feedback: A Reprieve from Loops of Madness
I imagine you experience your own version of this cacophony when you work with words. The person who makes a habit of writing tends, I think, to be the sort of person whose mind is predisposed to infinite loops—and if you’re not careful, these multiply, especially when you start to revise: Does the plot make sense? Is the theme coming across? Did I include everything that matters … and nothing that doesn’t? Will readers invest or become bored? What if everything I’m saying is nonsense? Did I remember to take the pork chops out of the freezer? Where’s my cuticle trimmer?
Skilled readers and editors serve numerous valuable functions, but the one I’m most interested in today is their power to press Ctrl+Break for you.
What a relief for the writer who has spent long hours at the keyboard cultivating scoliosis! While you enjoy the reprieve you’ve earned, these other sets of eyes and brains briefly take over the hunching, squinting, and cogitating. And when they turn your work back over to you, the really good ones also deliver short, useful lists of questions to consider. They may even give you constructive suggestions for how to answer them.
Between the R&R and the targeted reflections when you return to the desk, the hope is that as you fire back up your obsession engine, it runs at fewer RPMs.
I seem to always be looking for ways to convince writers of the profound value of revision.
It is hard to prove that this is not self-interest talking, but I really do believe in my marrow that:
Editing—repeated editing, including self-editing—is essential to the effectiveness and endurance of written communication.
This conviction is reinforced each time a client thanks me for helping them see where they can tighten a plot line, clarify a train of thought, or match tone to content. Their enthusiastic feedback is especially remarkable when I realize that writers are basically thanking me for giving them more work to do.
It confirms that we are on to something, my client and I: revision lets us sink our hands into the loam along the road of life, which fertilizes our joie de vivre even as we cooperate to help the words blossom.
The Gift and Necessity of Long Labor
If I could give just one gift of enlightenment to first-time writers (and to seasoned writers, one gift of remembrance) it would be this:
Life as a writer becomes better when you make peace with the long path.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to making your words resonate. Time sometimes flies, but quite often it crawls. Getting your writing to where it calls out clearly and beautifully is work. Exhilarating work, but also painstaking and iterative. You may hate the process sometimes before you love it again.
And all of this is so perplexingly enriching.
To be clear, I’m speaking about what comes after the initial outpouring that is your first draft. That birthing stage of creativity, I’m pretty confident, ought to be as easy and delightful as you can make it. But if you’re not ever experiencing difficulty in your writing process, consider rethinking your strategy. That is, if you are writing to connect with others and not for your own entertainment or therapy.
Effective and lasting communication is not easy. Why? It requires learning.
We don’t know anything as well as we think we do, and almost never does our first draft stumble upon the best way to put it in words. Editing and revision lets us glimpse our blind spots about our subject matter, how our words come across, the people at whom our message is aimed, and the limits on how well language bears the weight of reality.
And speaking of reality, revision also teaches us how to embrace hard choices. We aspire to literary improvement, but we never get all the way to perfection. Revision helps us discover ways (and willingness) that are good enough to make peace with that, too.
Remember: if your process always feels easy, the chances of your words getting somewhere meaningful and enduring are slim. The same goes for the personal growth that’s possible along the way.
So, dear reader: go long.
A wall in the ruins of Pompeii. Image credit: Adam Groves | Ultreya Editorial
Ruin is a bittersweet thing. I feel enriched by it from one perspective, as it reminds me that new life always springs up in the gaps left by what was. Life itself, under revision.
Weekly Wildflowers
Learning by Doing. Jessica Klimesh, fellow editor and writer, recently wrote insightfully and earnestly about learning through immersion, the pleasure and benefit of pursuing what you’re curious about, the value of taking risks, and embracing the fact that there is always more to learn. Her musings influenced my train of thought this week, so after you’re done here, I encourage you to check out her Substack.
Silicon Valley Has a Science Fiction Problem. On the theme of ideas vs. reality (or, perhaps, ideas about ideas vs. ideas vs. reality), Ali Rıza Taşkale wrote this fascinating examination of how tech corporations exploit sci-fi and fantasy stories to project a façade of humanitarianism and moral credibility. The article looks at how companies selectively pillage their source material and compares the abridged stories to the complex moral investigations of the original tales. (Aeon, the zine in which this article appears, is worth checking out in its own right.)
I wrote a craft review of The Last Thing He Said, by Laura Dave. I highlight some techniques Dave used to write an excellent suspense–mystery page-turner. I also briefly reflect on my reductive historical attitude toward genre fiction.
The Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem. What happens when your ability to form ideas about the world can no longer be trusted? While writing this newsletter I was reminded of Vintage’s diverse and inventive anthology, which gathers stories from some thirty authors on the theme of memory loss.
Why We Have Lawns. What’s there to learn about lawns? Apparently a lot! I love when someone grabs a hoe and digs into the complex history buried beneath a superficially simplistic phenomenon. This first of four articles from the National Wildlife Federation unearths some of the complicated, competing whys and hows of the grass outside your front door.
Progress Imperfect on the Road of Uncertainty
Before we part, a final anecdote and reflections. It occurs to me that making peace with hard work and complexity in writing is not just a matter of practical output. It informs one’s capacity to enjoy life in general and engage it deeply.
An eon ago I took a cognitive neuroscience class titled “The Mind–Body Problem.” I loved the subject matter and was enthralled by the professor, who had multiple PhDs. (In a world of infinite time, resources, and motivation, I would have loved to be someone with multiple PhDs—but that’s a gap between ideas and reality I’ll explore another time.)
The class was a blend of scientific observation and metaphysical rumination. Its pattern was: here are some facts … what parts of them are the mind? Here is one piece of how we believe the brain operates … does that constitute the mind? Here are some other things we’ve learned about how different parts of the body influence cognition … is all of it the mind? None of it?”
I emerged from that class asking, like the title of the Pixies song, “Where Is My Mind?” I also walked away feeling delighted that there was not a single, conversation-ending answer.
This was in my early twenties, when I was waking up to the fact that I am a disciple of complexity.
Of questions that resist trite responses. That professor was a scientist and a person of Christian faith, and I admired his commitment to seek truth while embracing the uncertainty he found along the way. His comfort with ambiguity modeled for me a life well-lived.
Whatever my convictions, I thought then and now, I also want to be humble, curious, and engaged. I still aspire to be someone who does not distort reality for comfort’s sake or ignore evidence that resists easy digestion.
Ironically, this carefully calibrated ideal, built of modesty and circumspection by my twenty-one-year-old self to inoculate me against hypocrisy and stultification, often unravels in a tangle of control issues.
I constantly forget that the map I’ve drawn cannot describe reality entirely enough that I never get lost or stuck.
Over and over, I freeze on my path from point A to point B like Atalanta in Xeno’s dichotomy paradox, and I obsess over the impossibility of dividing the remainder of my route into perfect, logically consistent stages that will carry me with zero mishaps to the end.
Sometimes I hang out in a conundrum for quite a while, trying to figure out how to break the rules of reality so as to avoid future pain and regret. Or I drift into regressive fantasies on an alternate plane where I draw idealized AB line segments that are effortlessly traversed by wishful thinking.
In such moments, you might say I am trying to figure out how to bypass the need for revision.
But eventually, something always brings me out of the abstract and back into the flesh.
A lot of times that is precisely what rescues me: the warm, fleshy insistence of now. Seeing as I’m in a body and all, and have no power to teleport myself to other dimensions, I must get on with life.
Other times I am reminded of the sketchiness of my map of existence, which helps me further recognize the fallibility of the surveyor—yours truly. Despite my best efforts, I can only see around so many blind corners and measure with so much accuracy.
Or sometimes (and this is my favorite sort of reminder) there’s a whisper in my ear that any true beauty to be had resides in the here and now, in real space, in lived action.
All of these reminders help me accept my limited nature, and in that process I find liberation. I’m not ultimately responsible to perceive or act flawlessly. It’s okay to proceed with the spirit and humility of a child in this grown-up body.
So I put away my paradoxes, and I say some prayers, or do some meditating, or go for a walk, or all three … and if I’m really ambitious that day I grab pen and paper to do some constructive journaling. Then I take a deep breath and step forward, arms open to the next occasion for reflection and action I’m bound to encounter.
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew wrote a book whose title I love. I have yet to read it, but I’m borrowing the phrase to summarize everything I’ve talked about today:
Living Revision.
This is what it means to me to live well. Not according to certainty; not through flawless execution; not by cultivating a pristine ecological desert on my fenced-in private property; not by writing one draft and hustling it off to the printers. Instead, I live well through leaps of faith; through well-meaning tumbles, advice and lessons and corrections, and endless renewed efforts. I live through eternally springing hope.
Dear reader, what helps you make sense of the world while also keeping you grounded and moving?
As you live your own revisions,
Ultreia et suseia,
Adam
P.S. - I enjoy genuine connection, so if a thought or question came up for you, hit reply and tell me about it.
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