Member-only story
Revising Doesn’t Just Make Your Writing Better
It can make your life better, too. Now go finish that draft.
When I was in my 30s I did a kind of stupid thing. Oh well, I thought, I guess I’m never going to get over it. Years passed. Then, by chance, I was asked to write an essay about this thing, so I did. Then I revised what I wrote, then I revised it again, then again. It was hard to make the story make sense, but finally it did and it was done. It never got published. That’s just the way things are sometimes.
I was mad for a week or so—no one likes to not publish an essay they wrote for publication. But one day, while I was busy being mad, I realized something truly incredible: I didn’t care about this thing anymore. It no longer held any emotional charge. I was pissed about my kill fee, annoyed with the editor, and their boss, and their boss’s boss. But when I thought about the actual subject of this doomed, never-to-see-the-light-of-day thing I wrote, I felt nothing. It was hard to even keep it in my mind.
It was not just because time had passed. It was not because I merely wrote about it. It was because I had told the story to death—in draft after draft after draft. I probably had eight versions of it, one with the beginning at the end, one with the opposite, one in past tense, one in the present, one with a Big…
