Revision

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John McPhee says, “The essence of the process is revision.”  He’s referring to writing, of course. But I have a hard time thinking of something about which that isn’t true. My garden, my hair, my living room, my life design, my relationships, my reading list, my parenting plan…most live on a conveyer belt under constant reconsideration. What could be better?  What needs tweaking? What isn’t really working, at least not as it could? Continual inspection keeps the quality high and the pressure to be perfect low. We are works in progress as are most of the things we do.

When I sent my Shakespearean professor the essay I had written about him before my book Rooted to Rise went to publication, it was not without trepidation. It had been taste-tested and twisted and examined upside down, and I felt good about it, but still. The twenty-two drafts of my “Save Ophelia” essay from thirty years ago kept running like a ticker through my mind.  I liked the structure and the detail (just enough, but not too much, I thought) of the story I had written, and there were a couple of a sentences in it that I absolutely loved. But I had zero expectations when I hit “send.” 

What I got back from Dr. Darryl Tippens, I will keep forever, for it was the gift of him. His email bled gratitude. He was openly humble, he was touched, and I could feel him tying a bow around what he’d tried to do with his life and what he’d obviously done. But then he did what he does best. 

He nudged me to revise.

After a brief disclaiming clause about still being a teacher at heart, he challenged me on a word. One word. He asked me to think about the striations. He liked the word I’d chosen, there was something edgy in its feel, but he wondered if perhaps it was the one that best conveyed what he thought I meant. Part of me clung to the word I’d picked. It was apt and I liked the three syllable rhythm it gave the sentence that carried the meaning I’d intended with its sound. But the other part of me started splitting all the hairs. One potential substitute was spot on, but it came with unintentional veiling. Another worked but carried too much weight when looked at in the context of the sentence that came before. My teacher made me go exploring. I went deep into the forest and came back out with a better word.

“The essence of the process is revision.”

Aiming for perfect at the first in one fell swoop is a recipe for disaster—whether you’re writing a paper or positioning furniture or plotting a plan for raising kids.  Knowing that there will be iterations as you go—that there should be iterations as you go—takes some of the initial pressure off. And yet, most times we’d rather just be done. Revising isn’t sexy. It’s laborious. It feels tedious and pedantic and mostly something academics do enroute to a Pulitzer Prize. But it’s how you get the gap to close between pretty good and wow.

In the world of weekly blogging, a deadline always looms. At some point, a piece simply has to be declared “finished,” though it rarely feels as if it is. The ever-almost-Tuesday that’s just around the bend doesn’t allow for a lot of time for the work to proof.  My revisions, though relentless, don’t get the advantage of being looked at with fresh eyes. As a result, almost every week once they go out into the world, I’d like to have one back for just a tiny nip or tuck.  

That’s the nature of revising, though, it mostly feels as if you’re never really done.

And yet, it’s how we make things great. The big, the little, the minutiae in between—it all benefits from a disciplined once- over when you think it’s as good as it can get. My haircut works because the guy who cuts it whittles when he’s done. He cuts it by the book and then he looks at it and says, it could be better if we take a little more here and leave a little more there. Likewise, my neighbor is a master gardener who grows all kinds of beautiful, unique flowers in a garden that thrives not because of what she plants but because of what she does to it as things grow. She’s constantly making tiny little amendments.  She moves the trillium when a tree branch breaks and it suddenly gets too much sun. She adjusts the sprinklers when the ferns get so large that they deflect the water’s spray. What’s good but could be better is how she approaches the work each day.

“The essence of the process is revision.”

Most things have a meet-the-world moment. The point at which you are forced to publish the work or deliver the speech or make the parenting call. But a lot of things don’t have such a clear-cut end. They just keep going with new opportunity for revision every day.

John McPhee calls revision his search for “mot juste”. He says, “In the eighth grade Miss Bartholomew told us that Gustave Flaubert walked around his garden for days on end searching in his head for le mot juste. Who could forget that?” he said.  “Flaubert seemed heroic.  Certain kids considered him weird.” Maybe. No, probably. I’m absolutely sure that they did. But isn’t that most obviously the thing that made him great?

P.S. Mia’s Makeover