As I embark on the task of teaching revision to my Freshman Composition students, I keep thinking back to when I was in the camp of the revision resistant. It wasn’t hard because it was only about a year ago. For me at least, and I imagine for some others too, there is a particular fear at the heart of my revision resistance, it was a fear of what I perceived to be my
own scarcity of resources. When I read something I’ve written that’s
good I usually feel like someone else wrote it. I think to myself, how the heck did you pull that off? When I read something bad that I’ve written I think, yep, now that sounds like you. Sometimes if a piece of writing seems good enough, it feels safer to cash in our chips and walk, than to bet on a second try actually pulling something better out of ourselves. Insecurity says, maybe there isn’t anything better in there. I
remember feeling this strongly all throughout grade school and even
during my undergrad years. I think the one-shot finality of most systems
of evaluation adds to the high stakes gambling feel
of writing and discourages risk-taking, and really risk-taking is the
only way a young writer can discover what works and what doesn’t. In
other words it’s the only way they can improve.
To
go at a piece of writing like a demolition crew with sledgehammers (to
borrow an analogy from Annie Dillard) is terrifying if you fear that you
lack the resources to rebuild. Knocking out loadbearing walls can be exhilarating, but only if you’re confident that you can erect something far grander in its place. But you can’t obtain that confidence until you’ve knocked out some walls. But you can’t knock out walls until you have confidence. Catch 22. But not really. FYE is the perfect place to force young writers into demolition work, painful, terrifying, pulse-pounding destructive mayhem!Students should write papers and then write them again from a different
point of view, or to a different audience or for a different context,
with a different tone or with both hands tied behind their backs. They should hand in an essay, and then immediately have to write
it again in class from memory with pencil and paper. Anything to pry
that death grip loose from the life-preserver of the words they’ve
already gotten down, to thicken their skins, toughen them up, make them Hell’s Angels of revision. Teach them to kill their darlings, to show no mercy, to believe in the superabundance of words, of materials with which to rebuild, help them discover that there are infinite words inside them. That they will never ever run out.
Hemingway,
as many know, lost nearly all his stories in a
briefcase in a train station, when he was a young struggling writer.
This was before the days of zip drives or even photocopies. He had to
face the fear of his own scarcity of words, his own belief that he could
never replace what was lost. He stopped writing for over a year because
he didn’t believe that he was the source of all those words, that if he had done it once he could do it again.
Once he realized that, he was able to write again, and most of the
works that we know and love from him are the result of that daring
second try at building something new on the site of the old.
If Hemingway wrestled with the fear that every well-crafted sentence or
story was somehow just a stroke of good luck, than we can imagine how
tentative our freshman writers must be, how reluctant to discard a
paragraph, sentence or word if any of it can be salvaged. I remember feeling that a page with something, anything, on it, no matter how paltry, was preferable to the horror of the blank page. That’s why I believe classrooms
should be like the show Fear Factor; students should be forced to lay
in claustrophobic spaces covered in revision, should swim unarmed in
shark tanks of revision, should balance on high wires suspended over
seething, swarming pits of revision, until they emerge, dazed but victorious, fists pumping the air like Rocky, ready to build mansions of words, having triumphed at last over their fear of revision.
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