Fixing Things

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In some writers’ representations, revising is “fixing” the text: “patching” it, like Christopher Isherwood (1976) or “repairing” it, like John A. Williams (1973). There is often a hint of mechanical work involved: Conrad Aiken (1974) speaks of “retooling”; Richard Eberhart (1977), Maxine Kumin (1983), Robert Lowell (1968), Tim O’Brien (1983), and Dennis Schmitz (1977) of “tinkering”; Philip Whalen says that he has “got to bang on it somehow to straighten it out” (1978, p. 37). Marguerite Yourcenar (1984) and Maxine Kumin (1983) both speak of “tightening” and “loosening”: “It wasn’t a matter of rewriting but simply of tightening up all the bolts, so to speak... tightening and loosening are jobs for a mechanic,” says Yourcenar (p. 184). Fred Chappell compares a long process of revision to a process in which one gradually finds needed parts and conducts repairs on an old car to get it running.

You work at it long enough, and it becomes so impersonal and so much an object that you’re working on... it’s like a car you’ve been trying to get to run, an old Hupmobile, that you’ve been looking for all the parts for, for the past thirty years, and, one of these days, you know that you’re going to take it out on the highway. (1973, p. 43)

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Chappell focuses on revision as the process of getting a car to run, getting it out on the road; Robert Creeley uses a similar analogy—in which he compares revision to tuning up a car—to describe how revision can lead to a text that functions harmoniously.

A poet say like Louis Zuko[f]sky has endless revisions upon his initial writing. It’s like tuning up a motor. He really isn’t satisfied until all the elements of the statement are for him utterly working in congruence. (1974, p. 208)

Chappell is concerned with obtaining solutions to the problems found in the text; he does not expect to have solutions for all of its problems immediately, but eventually. He expects delay, not because the problems are all inordinately difficult or because he is unskilled at fixing the text, but because new problems continually arise, each special in its own way, problems that must be solved individually, sometimes through tinkering, sometimes through borrowing. His image also suggests, of course, that the text is complicated, requiring the smooth meshing of many different parts, and that fairly small problems can prevent the text from working. Greeley’s comment focuses on the difference that attention to those small problems makes: without such attention, the text may “run,” it may perform its basic function, but raggedly, requiring more effort from the reader; with the additional revision it runs smoothly. Comments indicating that the text requires mechanical work to fix it suggest that revising writers employ technical or craft skills to solve practical problems. Their attention at this point tends to be on precision rather than energy or design.