Wednesday August 3, 2022; 1:07 PM EDT
- My work habit here in this space is to write every day, to keep thinking about how some portion of the writing might find its way into a longer project, and to revise a modest amount before posting each new piece. I usually don't revise an older posting here. To try to write decent or better sentences, knowing that sometimes I'm writing too fast to count on that happening.#
- The other day, however, I wrote a paragraph about a horse I saw from the window of a bus heading north from St. Louis to Iowa City, where I was in school in 1980. I told the story focusing on the horse and its experience, but on rereading a few phrases seemed wordy or needlessly formal or abstract, and I started tinkering. More rereading, and I noticed more about the posted version of the brief story. In part, I noticed that except for the horse at the edge of the field the experience was kind of disembodied. As a portrait of experience, it felt thin and gauzy. #
- More revising, then, brief phrases about being on the bus, about reading and looking out the window. More cutting of the words in the horse's part of the story, realizing that the description could be more spare, more cut to the essential. Less editorializing about what was happening--let the reader do some of the work, eh? A reader will notice things, probably exactly the same things I noticed on that bus 40+ years ago. Show the reader some respect, stop overwriting.#
- And the ending phrases, change the order. End with the most important five words. Use less grammatical complexity so as to focus on the resonance of the details. English (as a language) allows for (any number of) parenthetical constructions, but the more these intrude, the less immediate the impact of the main parts of the sentence. Get rid of them.#
- Open the scene wide, then zoom in, when you can, in a description. Pay attention to the order in which a reader will experience things in a sentence--there are better paths through ideas, through experiences, and worse ones, and the sentence will take a reader through the worse one if that's what you type.#
- But it's hard to notice these shadings without reading and rereading the draft. Listening to it over and over, noticing when it's less interesting, less clear, less immediate. Having noticed a weaker phrase, trying a new version and then living with it for a few rereadings to see if it's any better.#
- Some of the revisions made the paragraph longer, and some made it shorter. Like playing the accordion, air in and air out.#
- But as I said, I don't usually revise blog posts after the first few minutes of writing.#