At Align Your Story Writing School, we bring traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Join a community of over 25,000 other mindful writers. Get the tools and community to write your best work.
Seeing Differently...
|
Dear Reader, Revision is one of the most misunderstood and important parts of the writing process, and this week, in my Poetry of Attention Class, I'm teaching five different methods for revision. So I thought I'd share thoughts about revision with you here, too! The word revision can be thought of as re-vision: how do we both see and re-see? How do we meet our work with awareness and also be open to the possibility of change? How do we know what to keep and what to let go of? These are profound questions. And our mindset about revision extends not only to our writing, but to every area of our life: how we see ourselves, how we understand our stories, how we understand the historic and political moment we are living in. Here is some of what I share in my class. I'm talking here about poetry, but this can be applied to any genre: The Art of Revision:
Each poet, and more importantly, each poem has its own method of coming into being. Some poems come all at once. I remember hearing that Keats wrote one of his odes scribbled on a napkin all at once. By contrast, Elizabeth Bishop’s tight villanelle “One Art” started as a long, free form poem and went through more than a dozen revisions.
Some people like to revise soon after writing. Some people like to put their poem away for a long period and then come back and revise later. See what works for you.
There is not a right way to revise.
Before you start to revise, it’s helpful to be mindful of your general attitude towards the revision process and your work.
Even when we come to revision, we can still come with the attitude of appreciation and put aside the critical judgment mode that so many of us can fall into when we start to read and revise our own work.
Because we wrote as children in school for grades, many of us have been trained to approach writing from the left, critical brain. We’ve been exploring ways to come out of that critical judgmental mind so that we can come into creative flow and let the creative power of imaginative play and intuition come through. And we can do this not only in our first drafts, but also in our revision process.
I invite you to think of the revision process also as one of growth and discovery.
I invite you to think of revision as re-vision—as seeing again.
And I invite you to think of the process not as getting to one final perfect version, but as a process of improvisation and play where you are learning as you go. As in jazz, there might be several wonderful final versions—be curious.
Yes, you might need to choose one, but don’t get stuck in the mindset that there is one perfect poem or one perfect outcome.
Our creativity itself is abundant and always changing.
In this course [Poetry of Attention], I share five different approaches, all of which can also be used in tandem.
Here is the first: Welcome and Listen to Your Work
In this method of revision, when we look at our poem, we try to see it with new eyes, to re-vision it.
In Rumi's wonderful poem "The Guest House," he invites each emotion into his house as an encounter with a guest, a visitor from beyond who has something to teach him.
When you re-read your poem, try to see it as a visitor. What does it want to teach and reveal to you?
There is a long history of looking at poetry as a kind of visitation.
In Ancient Greece and Rome, literature was thought to be the domain of the muses. The Odyssey opens with “Oh Muse, tell me.” The chorus in ancient plays was also thought of as voices and authorities from beyond who witness and comment on the action of the play.
In the medieval world, poetry and dreams were both seen as being sent from the divine. Many of the earliest remaining poems in English and French were dream poems. Chaucer’s first long poems were dream visions. The thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose is a dream vision and one of the first long French poems. These poems participated in a whole system of reading and interpreting dreams.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, we might say that the voice that speaks through a poem from beyond is the voice of the unconscious. Jung, of course, explored the relationship between the unconscious, dreams, and creative imagination. (....)
So, before you decide what is working or not working in your poem, before you decide what you like and don't like, spend some time with your poem. Listen to it. Let it speak to you. Trust that even in its nonsense, it has something to tell you.
A poem invites a relationship, and the more conscious you are of your relationship with your own writing and voice, the more fruitful your writing—and your revision process—will be.
I go on to share a lot of practical techniques to revise works, but as helpful as those practical techniques are, the quality of attention we bring and the questions we ask of our work are just as if not more important. I encourage you to look back at some of your own work. Can you see your writing as a visitor with something to tell you? Can you be open to surprise, to the unexpected, in your own work? I encourage you to read your own work aloud and really listen to it! These are uncertain times, but can you see your life, too, as an encounter with a visitor from beyond? Whatever the challenges or the wonders are that meet you, is there some sacred encounter taking place with a message for you to listen? For me, this is an ongoing practice—to stay open and enter into more welcoming, sacred relationships with my work, myself, and others. My hope is that you find this approach to revision and re-vision inspiring. Let me know what you think! with love, |
Hi! I'm Nadia Colburn—writer, teacher, yogi, activist
At Align Your Story Writing School, we bring traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Join a community of over 25,000 other mindful writers. Get the tools and community to write your best work.
Dear Reader! The days are getting shorter here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the leaves are turning... This is a season of settling, of letting go, and of coming back to ourselves. Even as our public world spins out of balance, all around us is also beauty, love, pleasure and joy—if we open to it. When I first started teaching, I was surprised to find that one of the biggest challenges many students have is writing joy. Why is writing joy challenging? It’s partly that we turn to writing to...
Dear Reader, One of the things that used to truly baffle me as a writer (and as an activist) was how to stay present. Wasn't it my job as a writer to go back to the past and explore it? Wasn't it my job as a writer and thinker to understand history and to imagine, and be a voice for, what I wanted for the future? How could I do these things and also be present? When I was sitting at my desk writing, was I really being present? I wondered if I even wanted to be present. Was the multi-billion...
Dear Reader, I hope you had a good weekend! I myself am back from a lovely week away with my family. These are unusual times, and I'm writing with two messages. First: If you live in the US and are concerned about the direction this country is going, call the Senate--the Reconciliation Bill is being debated as I write. Call your senators and say you don't want to further fund billionaire tax breaks and ICE while Medicaid and clean energy are being cut! According to Senator Warren, there are...