Wally Lamb, On Revising Fiction

00:08 [Wally Lamb] I think to demystify what revision is, really it's some combination of four different strategies. One, what can you add to make it a stronger piece? Two, what can you cut that's going to strengthen it or bring it sharper focus?

00:30 What do you need to clarify? Lots of times I'll write something that I think is perfectly clear, and I'll bring it to my group and somebody will say, "Well, I was confused, when he says this, did he mean this or did he mean that?" And I'm writing everything down that anybody's saying in terms of the feedback. And I'll think to myself sometimes, of course I meant that, and then somebody else will say, "Yeah, I was confused by that too." And when that second

01:00 voice chimes in, you know you need to clarify. So add, cut, clarify, and the fourth strategy is reordering. If something is buried in the third paragraph on the third page but would make a great opening, say, how can you—maybe putting it someplace else is really going to make it pop out and be more noticeable. Those are really the four strategies, some combination

01:30 of those. I certainly feel that writing is 90 percent revision and lots of patience as the revision is going on. I'm using those strategies all the time, and trying to share those strategies with other people too. I guess probably when I was teaching at the college level the most useful thing that I taught,

02:00 or tried to model, was humility. I was working with college students who thought they were pretty good and didn't need to go too far beyond the first draft. So when I started there, having taught younger kids for years, suddenly I was faced with students who were a little bit offended that I didn't see the genius that they saw in a first effort. I would bring in

02:30 piles of my own stuff and say, "Here's draft one, and here's draft two." For a short story I would sometimes come up with a thickness that looked like the New York phone book. Little by little, when they began to see the payoff of opening your ears and open your mind to the fact that you can make it better, that was when things began to really turn.