Writers and Revision: An Interview with Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
by Beth Wright
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a writer, a teacher, and the author of Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice (Skinner House Books, 2018). I interviewed her about the joys and challenges of revision and how her book can help writers get better at what they do—and in the process gain deeper insights into the creative processes of writing and revising.
Beth Wright: Your book refers to revision as a spiritual practice. What makes it spiritual in your view? How does that affect the way a writer approaches revision?
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew: The word “spiritual” is slippery, isn’t it? I use it to mean “connected to the source of life,” and since the source of life is evolving, I also use it to mean “transformational.” A spiritual practice is the intentional effort of participating in coming more alive.
When we’re writing, we want our stories to come alive. But the best way to do that is to come more alive ourselves, because there’s this amazing link between our being and our story’s being. Revision is the stage where our writing grows up. It becomes more itself. Writers imagine we can move the words around on the page and make this happen, but we can’t. The inner life of our creative work is connected to our inner lives. We have to grow up too.
So if you embrace revision as a spiritual practice, you allow the writing process to move you deeply. I’m convinced that only writing that moves the writer will ever move readers.
BW: In your book you describe a process of drafting, revising, and editing that begins with a “cloud of privacy.” You have a wonderful illustration of the process with a little cloud drawn around one end of a horizontal line indicating the time period over which writing and revising occurs. Why is that “cloud” so important? What happens if a writer leaves that cloud too soon?
EJA: Freedom is a basic ingredient in creativity. The more freedom you have on the page, the more risks you’ll take, the more vulnerable you’ll be, the more exploratory, associative, honest, illogical . . . And you’ll definitely have more fun! Carol Bly wrote, “If the soul is thinking audience, audience, audience it cannot at the same time be inquiring of itself, kindly but firmly, ‘What are we doing here?’” We need a lot of space before we can ask the most important questions.
The trouble is, giving ourselves this much freedom isn’t easy. We’re far too self-conscious or concerned about our audience or product-oriented. So we writers have to play tricks on ourselves, dismissing the audience temporarily or writing so fast the inner censor can’t stop us. Eventually we can learn how to surround ourselves with this cloud of privacy, and eventually that cloud begins to grow.
Most writers I know begin considering their audience too soon. There’s a difference between being inspired by an audience (a call for submissions, for instance, or a conversation happening in the public domain) and allowing that audience into your writing process. Absolutely, we need to think about our readers before we launch creative work. But that doesn’t—I’d argue, shouldn’t—happen right away. First we need to play. We need to ask, “What on earth are we doing here?!”
I stole the term “cloud” from the fourteenth-century anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In contemplative prayer, you practice sitting in mystery. I think writers need to do this, too. If we’re drafting well, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. It’s pretty uncomfortable. But a certain amount of not knowing is incredibly fruitful.
BW: In another version of the illustration, more clouds appear later on the timeline, to show that sometimes writers need to revise without feedback. Why is it so helpful to go back to that cloud occasionally?
EJA: Once you begin revising, you’re conscious that you’re creating something—a product. It’s only human to grow attached to our products and to think of them as agents for bolstering our egos. But a creative endeavor has a life force all its own, and done well the revision process includes listening to that life force. So you need to figure out a way to tune out all those clamoring voices—“What will my mother think? Is this worthy of the New York Times Book Review? I’m not allowed to say that!”—so you can pay attention to what your project wants and needs. I use a project journal as a way to trick myself: “Within these covers you have no audience!” It helps me remember what it’s like to play on the page and then I can bring that freedom to the composition.
BW: A key concept of your book is what you call the story’s “heartbeat,” which you introduce in chapter 3 (pages 57–58). There you pair it with the term “inner story,” which you describe as the “current of emotion and thought that moves in and through the plot.” In chapter 9 you refer to “a story’s emotional life” and explain that “the theme that acts as the single, unifying lynchpin is the story’s heartbeat” (page 203). How does articulating the heartbeat help a writer to revise? Conversely, how does the revision process reveal the story’s heartbeat to the writer and eventually to readers?
EJA: In a way, the “heartbeat” is really the answer to Carol Bly’s question “What are we doing here?” It’s the piece’s raison d’être, its reason for being. We have all sorts of agendas for our writing, but the work itself also has its own purpose, and we have to discover it. Writing is strangely relational! I think it’s important for writers to articulate our piece’s heartbeat as best we can because that way we grow conscious of what’s really going on in our creative work. The more conscious we become, the more intentional we can be in crafting the work. It’s like steering a heavy ship, saying, “I’m going in that direction.”
When we write and rewrite well—that is, with an open, willing heart—we’re constantly surprised by what happens. All of those surprises add up over time. They form a pattern or a personality. Deep into revision, you start to sense the project’s direction; the project reveals what it’s essentially about. There’s no other way to get there. That’s why good writing teachers always advise us to trust the process.
BW: What have you heard from readers and reviewers about your book? Any surprises?
EJA: I shouldn’t have been surprised by how off-putting revision is to most writers, but I was! No one wants to take their creative project through a major overhaul. Why would you buy a book that encourages you to do just that?
That said, the readers who’ve contacted me have taken the plunge. They thoroughly use the book, marking it up, doing the exercises, and really growing in response. It’s deeply gratifying.
BW: I found your book extremely insightful for me as an editor working with writers at various stages of writing and revising. Are there any particular concepts in the book that you think editors would especially benefit from in their work with writers?
EJA: Perhaps the most important concept we’ve already discussed—the idea that writers can regulate when and to what extent they think about the audience, and the importance of at first writing for what Strunk and White call “an audience of one.” Another sticky point a lot of writers get hung up on these days is “show, don’t tell.” While it’s true that scenes can effectively engage readers, if writers never allow themselves to use the reflective voice, they never learn what they think and feel about their stories. It’s so important to realize that writing can be a long, forgiving process. You can “tell” all you want at first, and then translate that telling into showing later, or help that telling become lively. The whole revision process is about becoming conscious of what has emerged and then making deliberate choices.
A good developmental editor or writing coach sees through the manuscript to what the project is becoming, and then prods the writer to participate in that becoming. There’s this three-way dance between the writer, the manuscript, and the mysterious life force; a fine coach knows how to get the three moving again.
You can purchase a copy of Living Revision from your local bookseller or order it online. You can buy it directly from the publisher here.
Elizabeth currently teaches drop-in sessions on spiritual memoir writing at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the second Friday of every month. Learn more about Elizabeth's classes here.
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