Poets & Writers

I often find it helpful to think of revision as a story, the story of a story, if you like, the story of how a story gets written. In these “revision stories,” just like other stories, we fall in and out of love (with our own work), there’s often conflict (with critics, including the worst of them: ourselves!), false dawns, secrets to uncover, obstacles to overcome, and moments of revelation.

But, of course, one thing—probably the first thing—we all know about stories is that they have a beginning, a middle (even if it’s sometimes a muddle), and an end. And yet ironically one of the most confounding things about revision—a kind of outrage to our very sense of story—is that its end can seem at once impossibly distant and, even worse, hard to recognize.