Oh, if only I really were an operating system. That would explain all the glitches, and I could just eat cookies and wait for a patch to set things right.
The past two weeks have been devoted to seizures of introspection and rationalization, mostly because I haven’t been writing all that much. I actually have decent reasons for a change, so I don’t feel especially guilty about that dearth of productivity, but now that I’m sliding round to a better place, I’m trying to shake off the doldrums of dearthiness. Said introspection, however, has given me a better sense of my own revision process, and a little perspective on productivity is almost as good as productivity itself. I heart rationalization.
Because I work with three flavors of writing, I’ve had to concede to a variety of editorial imperatives. Editors of scholarly volumes and readers for critical journals normally identify Big Picture concerns, and the resultant revisions require fairly constant attention on my part, lest I lose sight of the touchstones in question. Commentary on my fiction requires more soul-searching, and I tend to work best with fresh impressions. One story, for example, was recently returned to me because the reader wanted to see a secondary character fleshed out more fully; rather than taking that sensibility as an ex cathedra pronouncement (as I normally would when accommodating an academic editor), I dwelled on the matter for a few days before determining that she was essentially wrong, given my own apprehension of the central narrative arc. The nice thing about fiction is that reassurance is often just a short jaunt down the road: several of my stories have been turned down by one editor only to be accepted by another as-is, and I have built up some trust in my own judgment. Most editorial commentary has been exceedingly valuable, and I’m always grateful when editors take the time to offer me a readerly perspective. At bottom, however, my own narrative sensibilities must be the final arbiter of a story’s success or failure. I’m not ashamed to say that three of the stories I’ve written will never see the light of the day–my own discretion finds them wanting and probably beyond repair. I can come around to that way of thinking about my own work without corroboration.
For poetry, however, I need a little more time and distance–but not too much. With very few exceptions, poetry editors will only comment on near-misses: I’ve collected quite a few form rejections on which a kindly editor has scrawled “Sorry, not this time….but we really liked Poem X.” At one point in time I thought I might be able to perform some rudimentary analysis and determine editorial preferences from such feedback, but that was a fairly fruitless enterprise. The essentials in question are far too fugitive and elusive to be pinned down by my naive empiricism.
I have learned, however, that my ideal window for the revision of verse is about 3-6 weeks. If I return to a poem before three weeks have elapsed, I can readily recapture the frame of mind I was in during its composition. As a result, the text usually seems just right, give or take a tweak or three. If I wait a month and a half, however, I tend to be less willing to forgive the self-indulgent noodling of the young, naive bald man. My revisions are more merciless (which is great, by the way, when I’m returning to a poem that’s been in the dustbin for several months), and my inclination to table the poem as a specimen of my own juvenilia is fairly strong.
Inside that window, however, I tend to split the difference: I can diagnose errors and excesses with some discernment, and I can accept mistakes, even ones that require major revisions, without gnashing my teeth and consigning the work to the Island of Misfit Poems.
In my own Big Picture, I suspect that learning how I learn is just as good as learning. And that, methinks, can’t be dismissed as rationalization.
