On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts

On Revision

Writing for Social Scientists

Howard S. Becker

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks

Wendy Laura Belcher

Writing Fiction

Janet Burroway, with Elizabeth Stuckey-French and Ned Stuckey-French

Writing Abroad

Peter Chilson and Joanne B. Mulcahy

The Architecture of Story

Will Dunne

The Business of Being a Writer

Jane Friedman

From Dissertation to Book

William Germano

Getting It Published

William Germano

From Notes to Narrative

Kristen Ghodsee

Storycraft

Jack Hart

Thinking Like a Political Scientist

Christopher Howard

Write No Matter What

Joli Jensen

Economical Writing

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Developmental Editing

Scott Norton

The Writer’s Diet

Helen Sword

Write Your Way In

Rachel Toor

On Revision

The Only Writing That Counts

WILLIAM GERMANO

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by William Germano

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41051-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41065-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41079-1 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226410791.001.0001

Page vii: the Perkins epigraph is quoted in Editor to Author: Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, ed. John Hall Wheelock (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), 178.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Germano, William P., 1950–, author.

Title: On revision : the only writing that counts / William Germano.

Other titles: Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021010998 | ISBN 9780226410517 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226410654 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226410791 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Manuscripts—Editing. | Authorship. | Academic writing.

Classification: LCC PN145 .G44 2021 | DDC 808.02—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010998

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together.

TONI MORRISON, INTERVIEWED BY HILTON ALS IN THE NEW YORKER (2003)

What’s the story, morning glory?

THE TELEPHONE HOUR, FROM THE MUSICAL BYE BYE BIRDIE (1960) (ALSO THE TITLE OF A 1995 ALBUM BY OASIS)

You must not take what I say as definite at all ever, but all as by way of example only. The whole thing might perhaps be done in some quite different way, and what I say are only suggestions toward the final effect. The ways and means to it may be different from what I have used to illustrate.

EDITOR MAX PERKINS, OFFERING WRITING ADVICE TO MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS (WINNER OF THE 1939 PULITZER PRIZE IN LITERATURE FOR HER NOVEL THE YEARLING)

O rocks! Tell us in plain words.

MOLLY BLOOM, WANTING CLARIFICATION, IN ULYSSES (1922)

Contents

1   Press start

2   Good to better

3   Know what you’ve got

4   Look for an argument

5   Build an architecture

6   Remember the audience

7   What writing wants

Acknowledgments

A very short bibliography

Index

Footnotes

1

Press start

I’m a terrible birder. Not just inattentive but inept. Binoculars are a birder’s tool, but first you need to know what you’re looking for.

Sure, egrets and red-tailed hawks are easy to spot, and from an Amtrak car I once saw a bald eagle at the edge of the Hudson. Birds move fast, hide from us, resemble other birds, are residents or visitors. In good weather, and if the whoosh of Manhattan traffic isn’t too intrusive, my urban window pipes in morning birdsong from invisible birds. I know they’re only sparrows and such, but I enjoy the stupid wonder of knowing they’re out there, safe from my prying eyes.

Bird calls are distinctive, so birders assure me, but I haven’t put in the time to learn them. In Central Park I can come across real birders, as silent as statues, pointing sturdy field glasses at something—what? somewhere? where?—when all I see above me is blue and green and shadow. I have to be content with the very secondhand thrill of being that close to a rare migratory species (there it is, somebody whispers), a brushstroke making a brief stop in urban greenery as it heads south or north. At least I’ve learned that I’ll hear a bird before I see it—a call or just a few leaves rustling where—what? over there?—disturb the underbrush.

I must have had Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life in mind when I wrote those paragraphs. Lamott’s bestseller takes its title from a family anecdote, her ten-year-old brother freezing up at the prospect of writing a report on birds. Lamott writes that when the boy is immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead his wise parent advises him to take it bird by bird.¹

Lamott’s book is no more about birds than this one is, and she’s writing about fiction, not academic prose, but there’s a kinship in metaphor. A day at a time, a step at a time, a detail at a time. For academic writers, that might mean another research monograph or article, an archive box, a theory, another endless Google search. Our birds are bigger, more complicated now. And though we might have trained professionally for exactly the kind of writing we’ve taken on, we can all feel immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead, at least sometimes.

The world of birds, the world of words. Listen. There’s so much to read with your ears. And to reread and re-hear. That’s what both writing and revising need, and that’s what On Revision is really about. One version at a time. One revision, then another.

Pick up anything well written and you can learn something about how writing works. Look for and listen to good writing the way you might look for birds, paying attention not just to bright colors and big forms (cardinals, hawks, eagles) but also to sounds, both the calls and the rustling high in the canopy or right there at your feet.

Good writing has a convincing shape. But it doesn’t just look good on the page. It sounds good. You already know that. It’s not a secret that successful writers have somehow kept to themselves. You can often hear what makes the writing good even before you’re fully conscious of the meaning of a sentence or the import of an argument. That’s not a trivial response to writing, either.

So the best rule for revising your writing is the simplest: listen to it. It’s the best way to write, too. That took me a long time to figure out. Read it out loud.

But of course when you hear people (including me) say, Read it out loud, they mean all sorts of things.

Read it out loud, and you’ll hear how confusing it is.

Read it out loud, and you’ll hear that you repeat the same words again and again.

Read it out loud, and you’ll hear that your strongest point flies by too quickly.

Read it out loud, and you’ll hear what’s happening, moment by moment. You’ll hear that puzzling sentence that sets the reader up and then stops short. The spot where your voice changes so much that it’s as if somebody else is suddenly talking.

Read it out loud, and you’ll find the bit where you sound as if you’re getting bored, and then the spot, right there, where your energy and enthusiasm burst from the page.

Can you hear all that?

Writing isn’t just well-structured sound, of course. It’s sound about something, sound in the service of something. Writing and rewriting and rewriting—the thing and its revision—depend on what we might call acoustic reading. Sound plus something. Somehow good writing becomes even better writing when you listen really hard, listen to how the ideas move, pause, and take off again, almost as if they knew more about where to go than you do.

Because they do.

Every writer is Jacob wrestling, not with an angel but with an angle. What’s more, each Jacob has to find that angle first. Either at the beginning of a project or belatedly, during a long second (or third) look at what’s been drafted, you’ll have to discover what you want to say and why you think others will want to hear it. Revising might be the first time you really understand what you’ve been saying, but it’s definitely the last time you can say it before you hand it over to an editor, and from an editor on to the world.

What’s true for what you’re writing has been true for the book you’re reading now. Given its subject, I think I owe you at least a brief account of how On Revision came to be. For a long time, I’ve wanted to think through, on paper, what was important about revising writing, especially revising complex writing. I thought others would want to read about that, too, mainly because revising is a problem every writer faces. And, frankly, I couldn’t find anything that had more than a few encouraging pages about how (much less why) to revise academic writing.

Was there a gap in the literature? Or was revision just too difficult to write about? It’s one thing to go through a student’s paper or offer a sympathetic read of a colleague’s working draft, but what exactly—and I want to emphasize that elusive quality of exactness here—could one say about revising writing that a professional writer, or a professional in training, or an advanced student wouldn’t already know?

I told myself that writing this book would not be so hard to do. I’d had plenty of what counts as experience. In my first career I had worked as an editor and publisher of scholarly books, tackling the weaknesses and undeveloped potential of very good and sometimes very great manuscripts. Everything you work on as an editor becomes part of your own capacity to read and reread, write and rewrite, and to help others do just that.

I’m a teacher, too. For the last fifteen years I’ve been working with smart undergraduates at Cooper Union, a small college that specializes in engineering, art, and architecture and where, I remind my students as gently as possible, no one is admitted because they’re great writers (and, yes, some are). My first-year students and I work together on reading and thinking and writing, and not simply on writing: that would be meaningless, or at least meaningless to me. Surely my time in the classroom, in tandem with that earlier part of my work life, had given me the keys to writing about revision.

Finally, though probably most important to my sense that a book about revision was possible, I’d written books before. Whatever I had been able to do with and for other writers’ projects, I had also done in some way with my own. I’d drafted and discarded, reorganized and reworded, made large-scale changes and fine-tuned, and if I didn’t always know exactly why I had done those things with my own words, I had at least built up a body of firsthand experience as a writer that I could now go back to and think through. From Dissertation to Book was meant to be something like a car repair manual for doctoral students and recent PhDs. The advice it offers still seems good to me, but in what you’re reading now I wanted to swim further from shore, not just to think about revising any particular sort of scholarly work but to ask a bigger question: What do we think we’re doing when we write and when we rewrite?

Getting On Revision down on paper, however, turned out to be a challenge. The pages you’re holding have been revised and re-angled many, many times. I drafted a full manuscript, submitted it to Chicago, and studied the reader reports as soon as they arrived. My manuscript needed more work. So I went back and pulled the stitching out, and read and read and reread what I’d drafted, listening for lines that didn’t quite do what I needed them to. Was this passage too schematic, that one too anecdotal? It seemed that I had written a version of this book, but not the version.

I went back to my own premises and my own questions, back to my own archives (a concept we’ll look at in the pages to follow). I knew I wasn’t writing a reviser’s style guide. I knew that I wanted to bring into the same frame both a philosophy of writing, especially as it applies to the range of forms and styles that academic publishers engage, as well as some centrally important practical issues. If I were going to revise my own manuscript effectively (insert as much irony here as you like), I would need to keep both in mind. This book, a thing much revised, is both less and more than the version I first crafted. But all of that is irrelevant to you as a reader because what you see now is the only version that I’m showing you. If every worthwhile thing you read by anyone anywhere is merely the last revision in a series of revisions, even if you think of every published text as the final performance after months of rehearsals, elisions, recantations, and sparks of happy insight, and even even if, as you engage whatever you’re reading, you crack open your store of readerly sympathy and indulge just the smallest awareness of all the word-churning that’s gone into what’s on the page, you will reasonably stop yourself and say, That doesn’t matter. I can only read what the writer has put right here. And that’s the way it has to be. The writer’s lament But I worked so hard on it! doesn’t cut it. Writers know this simple, hard truth, and that’s why they revise, and why they work so hard, even on revising.

But how to think past seemingly aimless word-churning? Guiding principles can help us, as can targets and a few rules. Plus instinct. Process isn’t just mechanics. In Ludwig Bemelmans’s classic children’s book Madeline, the attentive Miss Clavel senses that something is not right in the old house in Paris all covered with vines. Has Miss Clavel heard a cry? Or does her instinct tell her something first? (Spoiler alert: Madeline has appendicitis, and it all turns out fine.)

To any writer—you, for instance—instinct is invaluable. You arrive at what we call instinct through practice and the evidence of sensory clues. Instinct feels like something you make, or build, or develop. It would be hard to write or revise without instinct. But what is instinct, anyway? Maybe instinct is the name we give to all the essential writerly skills we can’t otherwise identify.

Identifiable skills, practical techniques, working notes, instinct, gut feeling, hunches. Though they may sound like an unlikely troupe of players, when you write and revise you call on all of them. But no tool for working your way into a draft is more important than just reading it as carefully as your ears will let you and staying focused on what you intended to say. Say, not just describe or explain, even if your project requires that some things are described and some other things are explained. Revision is less a matter of fixing errors than of saying more clearly, thinking your writing through from the ground up so that you know why you’re doing something, why you’re going somewhere, why you’re taking your reader somewhere with you.

Revising, not as correcting and not as wholesale reinventing. Revision as adjusting: an attentive revision often involves tweaking the course of your thinking or, as the electronic voice says in your car, Recalculating route. You might think you’re lost, at least for a few minutes, until you realize that in revising you’ve backed away from a path that wouldn’t take you anywhere. Recalculate route often enough and you’ll think of it as an instinctive ability to learn from being lost, even how to get un-lost. You may learn new routes, too.

Instinct and attention. If writing a good first draft is a kind of informed listening, then a revision of that draft is just more of the same, only with fewer messy bits. When you’re done you cross your fingers that the new version works. You’ll know by now that this isn’t a cookbook, much less a speedy shortcut to writerly nirvana. In fact, the two chapters immediately ahead are meant to slow you down a bit, to get you to reflect on what you have, what you know, what you want to say better. Then come