No Layoff from This Condensery

On the daily practice of revision and learning to see your work anew

I shared a post last fall about ten steps I take in revision; this post is a bookend to that one, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Dear readers,

Recently, I gave a craft talk on self-editing, and I’ve been continuing to think about it since. The phrase—self-editing—sounds clinical, doesn’t it? Mechanical, even. But when I speak of self-editing, I don’t mean perfectionism or pruning a piece into submission. I mean something more intimate and strange: learning to read yourself. To listen for the work beneath the work. To become your own translator and detective, your own wary reader and fiercest advocate. To understand your own habits of syntax and hesitation; what you need to push yourself to do; where you need to extend yourself forgiveness and permission.

Laying it all out. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The title of this post comes from one of my favorite poets, the modernist Lorine Niedecker, whose incredible “Poet’s Work” thinks about the actual labor involved in writing, after her grandfather advised her to “learn a trade.” It ends “I learned/ to sit at desk/ and condense// No layoff /from this/ condensery.”

This is true! The work is daily and requires, well, just learning to sit at your desk when the world is always telling you to do some other kind of trade. I think I do most of my writing in self-editing—to an almost pathological extent. To reenter any piece of writing, I have to read it from the top. With a long book, I can sometimes start from a “section” of the book; but at times, I have to read the book from the start, every day. When I was finishing The Invisible Kingdom during the pandemic with two tiny kids at home this drove my partner a bit crazy, I think: for hours, I was just rereading what I had reread yesterday, in order to write a little bit more that day. (I also ideally edit by hand. Handcraft, as I say in this conversation with Merve Emre, is, for me, part of making anything.)

There’s no universal formula for good writing—if there were, I’d be out of a job—but over the years, I’ve noticed patterns. Things I look for in my own writing, and in the work of students or peers. And most of all things I do, ways I approach self-editing. What follows is not a checklist, exactly, but a constellation: a set of practices, habits of attention, ways of returning to the page with rigor and tenderness alike.

Write a paragraph that says the thing you’ve avoided saying—clumsily, courageously. Then ask: where does this belong?

Ten Things I Ask Myself When Revising