I wasn’t responding so much to the technique itself, but more to the possible flattening-out of the concept of “revision,” the conflation of global re-seeing (along the lines of your “Waterlilies” example) and local proofreading (among which I would include the “avoid cliches” advice). Perhaps I was reading into your post a mistake many students make, which is to hear the word “revise” as “edit” or “proof.”

I think you maybe mean both, which is fine. I think the distinction between global and local revision is a useful one, though. I don’t want my students to get hung up on style when they really need to rethink the whole thing. I suspect that proofreading can lull writers into a false sense of having “fixed everything.” Better, I think, to start at the level of overall purpose, then work downward.

J: I think you’re right, that I was thinking in terms of what I would say to students. But that raises an interesting question: is writing advice for student writers different than it is for other kinds of writers? I suspect that RM is coming more from a creative writing context. Does that affect how we read his tips?

Oh, and I envy your process, or at least the thoroughly midwestern protestant work ethic you bring to writing.

A teacher of mine, a Robert Hayden fan, showed some colleagues an I old drafts of his famous poem Monet’s Waterlilies. Objects in it constantly get mentioned, removed, placed in again, revised, and then scrapped. The final poem is only eight lines long: some earlier drafts were pages. In the end, it would seem, he found compact usefulness more important than conveying every last idea.

By “things you can’t see,” I’m referring to quite literally everything. Down on paper, it’s easier to skim through pages and find what’s good, what’s not: on a computer, you tend to lose a sense of perspective. I’m not a fan of reading aloud: some pieces, especially more modern ones, lose a lot in the tone of the reader, which is a shame. I’ve read works of mine aloud and heard something utterly different than what I see on the page. Other friends of mine have the same problem.

Looking at something on paper changes the way I interact with it — I don’t know exactly why, but I think it partly switches my gears so that I engage with what I’ve written not as a writer trying figure out the next sentence, but as a *reader* ready to critically engage, pen in hand. And what I write with that pen feels less constrained, because it’s happening (messily) in a margin — the stakes feel lower, and it creates a kind of distance that has nothing to do with seeing typos, and everything to do with my readerly self being in dialogue with my writerly self.

The other thing printing allows is the drawing of arrows, of circling a paragraph and drawing a big arrow pointing to the back of the page where I might draw a big flow chart or something. I think EB has written stuff about different ways to visually/spatially arrange info — and for me that kind of stuff often happens on the back of a printed draft. A final comment on materiality: revising on paper allows postures and locations for writing that don’t work very well with a computer. Lying outside in a park on a sunny day, on my stomach, for example, sometimes helps me see what I’ve written in a (ahem) different light.

But you seem to be looking more for advice geared toward students, which is maybe a little different? As those who have seen me in action would probably note, there is precious little to recommend about my process.