Redefining Revision

Beth Bigler is a “recovering” reality television producer who developed numerous television series, including The Real Housewives of Atlanta. She is a proud graduate of NYU Film School and Goddard College (MFA) and her plays have been produced in New York and Los Angeles. Recent poems can be found in Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.

My first true lesson in revision came at 14, when I took my first creative writing class. During the introductory one-on-one tutorial with my incredible poetry instructor, whose poems and presence intimidated me to pieces, I presented the greatest piece of poetry I had ever penned. He studied it carefully, made a bunch of scribbles, and handed it back to me. I was dismayed to see that he had crossed out every line except one. He opined, "There's only one good line in the poem. Start over with that one." With that, the meeting was over.

While this felt harsh at the time, I now categorize it as my single greatest moment for learning revision. What my teacher demonstrated, whether it was making us rip up our favorite composition and toss it into a lake or mercilessly cut lines we had slaved over, was that we must never be too attached to our work. Not being too "precious" about our work is a complicated lesson for any writer to understand. But, the ability to not take myself too seriously and not believe any of my work is beyond reproach is essential to my growth as an artist. To this day, I am never too self-satisfied about any word, line or poem that I write. But, how do we become less smug?

We must be ruthless. We must stop being afraid. We must not be married to our first drafts. We must slash and burn our own work. In a recent workshop, Tom Lux discussed two lines in one of my poems, which were excellent but harmed the overall effect of the poem. He suggested, "Good poets cut good lines. Great poets cut great lines."  We must not only be Draconian when lines are not working but we must be able to chop lines that are strong on their own but not contributing to the whole poem. We can always save those great lines for later! Theodore Roethke was notorious for this. His phrase, "a sidelong pickerel smile" was written in 1938 and nested in several poems before it landed in "Elegy for Jane" in 1950. His "The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising" was born in 1937 and wove its way through several poems before finding a home in "The Meadow Mouse," published in 1963. We must be patient with ourselves and our work. We must allow years, if it takes years, for the revision to resolve.

Finally, we must stop viewing revision as a chore and start seeing it as a place of discovery. Who would want to know all the answers to a poem in the first draft? Chase Twitchell says, "Poems begin in ignorance." Through the process of re-seeing our drafts, we find the answers to the questions we were asking in the first place. Our readers are with us to watch a moment unfurl before our eyes and theirs. Revision is the place where we can really begin to see what we were after. Take Robert Frost seriously when he offers, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." Allow revision to free us to find the place of surprise that will leave us stunned and our readers dazzled.