Revision Season #3
On how covering up tattoos is like revising drafts, and how revising drafts is like wandering the grocery store, and other beautiful ugly things
Hi Friends!
Last week didn’t have a ton of writing or revising. It was full of other things: family celebrations, my kid’s rock camp performance (her all-girl band did songs by Alanis Morisette/Stevie Wonder/Veruca Salt, and yes, they kicked ass), a few days of solo parenting, and also a new tattoo. The tattoo was a coverup of my first (poorly applied, healed, conceptualized, etc), which had been a match with now completely indistinguishable Morse code on it. The new tattoo, done by artist Ren Glass at Flowerhouse Tattoo in Bushwick, is a dagger and scarlet flax blooms on my inner arm. It took some time to get the design placed correctly to cover the match and also look good on my arm. Ren and her apprentice Melissa and I talked through how to make it all work. Lots of adjusting. Some re-designing. Lengthening and shortening and moving and checking it so many times. It was done with so much care and attention in service of beauty and meaning1 and I love it.
It of course occurred to me that there is a parallel here to the work I’m doing in my revision, in that a cover up is inevitably built on (and around) the foundation of what’s below. The first tattoo decided the direction and shape of the next one in the same space. A first draft decides the direction and shape of the next draft; even if you start over with a blank page, you’re always working on top of—around, in memory or opposition of—what was there.
I’d grown very tired of the first tattoo, of the visual reminder of choices I’d made that I didn’t regret exactly, but wished I had made differently while also understanding I didn’t know enough to make them differently at the time. Same with a draft. Once you see clearly that a draft no longer does what you want it to, there’s a tendency towards being dismissive or embarrassed of the self that made it. But as with so much, you make the choices you do with the information you have, and you can’t exactly pretend that what came before can be left cleanly in a before, even if you aren’t looking right at it anymore. You come to understand that you need the before to get to the now.
Now I know more about what I want on my body, how to ask for it, what to look for in an artist, what I can endure (this was my longest one, and it was more painful than I recalled, but it was okay, and had me thinking a lot about the concept of purposeful pain, which is maybe an essay? TBD!). My last two tattoos2 have been far more colorful, and larger—one of the problems with the first tattoo was that it was too small. I am myself bolder than I was when I got it, 7 or so years ago3. My work, too, has gotten bolder; I do know what I want from it sooner. Yet it doesn’t mean it’s faster or smoother in the process.
When a tattoo heals, it goes through a shedding of that top layer of skin, now marked in the ink. It looks like a sunburn peeling, though is far prettier, as though a piece of tracing paper with the image is coming off in colorful bits. It itches a lot in this stage, and it takes a lot of patience to not rush the peeling by poking at it, but that would hinder its healing, so I let it do its thing, be a kind of beautiful ugly on its way to being the beautiful thing there forever. Summoning this patience with my draft, letting it be in process, whatever it looks like day to day.
Time for some lists!
What I’ve Done So Far
Read through old notes I’d flagged to make sure everything I mean to stuff into this draft makes it in. I got really nuts with this for a day, scanning and printing out typed lines very small and pasting them onto the TO DO index cards in the chapters I think they will end up in. I knew it was mildly unhinged at the time.
Finally opened up Scrivener (the only app for writing at this scale IMHO) and cracked into the manuscript, typing from the top. It was scary and good.
Woken up in the morning with a sudden understanding of how to approach a scene. I know I sound super cool when I say I live for those moments.
Made some logistics decisions for characters/situations I’m excited about.
Weird Googling, like this below.
What I’m Doing Now
Rewriting chapter 1, retyping from the top. It’s gone slower than expected—both because of life scheduling and because it’s important to get the opening right, and as I’d noted in #1 of these, I realized these chapters need a big overhaul. Retyping isn’t as linear as you might think—like often I know there is something I want to grab from another part of the chapter (or in my notes, which I unhelpfully mark with things like: + section in notebook, when I have 3 full notebooks over 3 years, thanks, me), kind of like when you’re in the grocery store buying something and then remember something else that’s not on your list in another aisle but you have to keep walking towards the original thing you’re walking towards while remembering the other thing you are going to get after, which is who knows where. In the grocery store or at my desk, this is usually when I start muttering to myself.
I think part of the slowness is that I’m starting at the top, so there’s a lot of set up happening. So much information has to be given to the reader but ideally not in an information dump. Both my kids went through hardcore Babysitters Club reads (just like their mom except I had to wait for new ones to come out that’s how many years old I am) and the other night they were talking about how chapter 2 was always the exact same introduction to each of the characters and how annoying it was. So while I will sit humbly and gratefully at the altar of Ann M. Martin, I’m trying not to do the literary fiction form of that. The goal is to get the book to you, dear readers, so that it looks seamless, and not like someone is giving you the 30 page set up for the actual story while also not having you go wait who is that where are they what is happening for 30 pages and then chuck the book into a river/your building’s laundry room book giveaway pile (where all my DNF books go to meet their soulmates).
For the most part though, rewriting this opening is one of those times where the book feels like it’s falling into place. When I lay a new line down it can feel like it’s been there all along—a secondary character’s apartment, a line said at meeting between two characters, an articulation of a precise feeling it took me writing the entire first draft to understand. Like they’re parts of a story I had forgotten to tell someone, but have always been there, undeniably true.
What I’ve Learned
How far I’ve come! Going back through my notes, it was interesting to see what I didn’t know and what has changed. Character names. Theories about characters I have made firm or tossed aside. Three summers ago I had what I called a subzero draft—a collection of notes, essentially, that I was trying to make a story out of. Now I have an honest-to-goodness novel. It’s good to take a moment to appreciate the work I’ve put in.
What’s Ahead
Finishing chapter 1. I desperately hope to be in chapter 2 by the time I write you next. Optimistic things are picking up speed as my schedule clears up a bit.
What I’m Afraid Of (a new section!)
An overloaded, overworked beginning. The opening chapters of anything tends to be the most worked and I don’t want to throw out what’s good. Baby, bathwater again.
Somewhere in the back of my head, not selling this book either. I try and keep that voice quiet—it’s a long way off till I’ll know and it doesn’t help to work with this in mind. I still, miraculously, like this book, and think editors and publishers will too, enough to buy it (liking it is not enough, I and many others have learned the hard way). But I can’t say. You have to work knowing you cannot say.
Religion of Office Supplies Report
I’m mortified to admit that when I did the notes onto index cards thing mentioned above I used a paper cutter and a glue stick, the whole time understanding that I’d pretty much lost my mind. Sometimes you need to do the weird thing.
Made good use of my new pink Micron and Optiflows in marking up pages before retyping.
Busted out my pages holder for typing from the top. I have a really boring/ugly one from Staples, but I’ve long wanted this one if anyone wants to send me a revision/birthday gift.
Those giant Post Its are still in their packaging, awaiting their moment to shine.
Where to Find Me
Not teaching for a while. Though I was super excited to sell out my reverse outlining class, running classes without the support of an organization like Catapult has quite frankly, kind of sucked. Marketing is hard. Enrollment is hard. I appreciate every one of you who has taken my classes and spread the word to others about taking them. I hope to figure out some more classes for fall, but for now, I’m really focused on the revision. I will be doing another round of Should You Apply for an MFA Q&A with Write or Die on August 16th, at 7pm EST. This event is free but you do need to register here.
Really into Edan Lepucki’s latest, Time’s Mouth, which I am lucky to have received an early copy of, and which you can pre-order now, or buy wherever books are sold by humans and not billionaires for the love of god, please, in August. Lepucki’s work is always really fun and juicy and capital-C California the way it seems only natives can get to and it always always has heart and soul and humor. Get it!
Admiring my new tattoo.
Talk Soon,
Danielle
This is only my 4th tattoo—I have the eye from my book cover on my wrist, a sword and blueberries on my left upper arm, the aforementioned match—and while it does have a good deal of personal meaning to me I don’t care to explain, this round, it’s a lot about the simplicity of having something powerful and beautiful on the arm I use to write.
My last tattoo was this gorgeous one by Sophie C’est La Vie, who was also an absolute pleasure to work with. I’m in awe of the work of these women!
I was 38 when I got my first tattoo. It had never really occurred to me to get them before. Something about reaching the age in my body where I’d grown tired of what other people thought of it and how it should be did, and continues to, spur me on. It coincided with publishing my first book. With speaking more publicly about women’s stories and the ways we cannot control how we are perceived.
Hey hey thanks for the shout out! And go go go w. this revision! xoxo