Scissors v. pencil — writers on revising

One Saturday morning when I was five or six, I found my mother in the breakfast nook with her scissors, cutting up paper for some sort of crazy art project. The snippets were all different shapes, sizes, and colors, wider ones taped next to narrower ones, jaggedly forming a longer sheet. All covered in her very neat cursive.

When I tried to get a closer look she screamed, “NO!” in the same tone of voice she used when I ventured too close to the hot stove.

Imagine having to revise your Master’s thesis with scissors and tape. I would have locked my kid in her room and not let her out until I got my diploma.

Yes, dear Reader, before “cut” and “paste” became items on a computer menu, they were literal things you had to do to revise your work.

“I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” —Truman Capote, Conversations With Capote by Lawrence Grobel, 1985

I never wielded the scissors much. Why? I never revised much when I was in school. And because some genius invented erasable typing paper. It was more expensive than the regular kind, sure, but an excellent investment if it kept me from having to retype an entire paper. Word processors and then computers changed the game completely. I finally became a reviser—and, wonder of wonders, a better writer too. Surely a coincidence, right?

Skip the scissors, keep the revision

Technology has made the physical act of revision so much easier. Now if only someone would invent something to ease the emotional challenges!

Whether you’re crumpling your words into a ball and throwing it across the room or highlighting and hitting the “delete” key, “killing your darlings” is never easy. It got easier for me when I ditched the violent metaphor and resolved to relocate my darlings instead.

Ah, the power of reframing. You may find it useful for all sorts of things you dread doing. But that’s for another blog.

They say the first step is recognizing you have a problem. So stop thinking your work doesn’t require revision. Write—write badly if you must, but write. And then revise. The best writers swear by it.

“I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1966