It amazes (and in many cases, worries) me how many people think the creative process goes something like this:
A tortured mind sits down at a desk or a computer or in the middle of the wilderness, closes his eyes, breathes deeply. He calls out for the muse to come to his aid, beseeching the gods and rending his garments until an idea takes him. Then, he's off, painting or composing or writing frantically, throwing words around like paint and painting lines like letters. Reckless abandon takes over, and for hours on end, time stands still and the creative plies his trade and makes his art. Then, suddenly, it stops, and the masterwork is created, full and complete, in its entirety. The creative steps back, satisfied, and goes off to bask in the glow of his new creation.
Real creation, of course, looks nothing like this. Real creation, if I had to put it into an analogy, is often more like a forced march through a quicksand pit.
What really gets me is how many people assume that a creator makes a rough draft of a work, looks it over for obvious mistakes (spelling and punctuation, legible notes, that sort of thing), and then declares it done. The thing so many people either forget, ignore, or just plain don't know about, is revision.
For the creative, revision is at least half the battle, and probably something closer to eighty percent. We spend most of our time revising what we threw down in that fit of muse-inspired ecstasy. Part of why I'm writing about revision today is that it's hitting particularly close to home right now how much revision I really do.
I got an email from my string publisher yesterday. She just went over all her submissions from the past several months, and she liked a lot of what I sent her, but she wanted revisions done on most of in. Four or five years ago, my first inclination might have been to scream and shout and swear, thinking her request for revision was a statement that what I had written wasn't good enough. I've come to realize, however, that revisions can be made for a number of reasons, and almost always make a piece or work better.
Some of the revisions are simple. One of the pieces is currently entitled Dreaming of Better Days, which, I gotta admit, is pretty depressing. She wants the title revised to something a little less morbid.
Others are not so simple. Changing the key a piece is in so it works better for intermediate violinists. Tweaking the end of a string orchestra piece because it suddenly jumps difficulty levels near the end, making it hard to place in the market and for an orchestra director to teach.
All of them have the end result of making a better product that will be better received. I do, however, still have to remind myself that this revision is as much a part of the creative process as is putting it down in the first place. No artist, no creative throws something down and it's wonderful, brilliant, solid gold from the get-go. Those that appear to have actually spent countless hours sketching and playing around with ideas long before they commit their first word or note or line to paper -- they've essentially done many of their revisions before they began the rough draft.
I'm also revising my writing. I printed out the rough draft of the second book of my Chronicles of Sadonia series and am working on revising it. It's a slow, painful process, page by page, line by line, adding in, taking out, fixing, correcting, and sometimes just plain changing.
I've done this sort of correcting before, on my first book, The Coming of the Heroes. While gathering things for my talk with our 5th graders tomorrow, I actually found the manuscript from The Summer of Red Ink, where I went through and did to that version what I'm doing to the second book right now. I'd forgotten just how much red ink there really was. I had stuck in sheets of notebook paper where I'd hand-written in whole new paragraphs or pages, and the places where I had squeezed in a paragraph in the margin were beyond count.
If the rough draft is throwing the ingredients into the mixing bowl, revision is all about taste and presentation: adding the right spices (choosing the right word, chord, note, color), getting the right texture (good flow, moving from one section or area to another), and arranging the final product beautifully on the plate (correct grammar, spacing, etc.). The final product -- be it chicken parmigiana or a string orchestra score -- has the exact same ingredients in it as the rough draft -- the mixing bowl and pan, or the first scribblings of a piece -- but the presentation -- the revision -- makes all the difference.
No comments:
Post a Comment