On Revision by Rory Stone Mehlman
There was a time when my revising of a short story could have been mistaken for composing a ransom note. Scissors in hand, I would push all the furniture from the living room, sit cross legged on the carpet, and go at my manuscript like Edward Scissorhands. Soon, strips of words, sentences, and paragraphs would rest around me. Next, I’d tape these back together—word by word, sentence by sentence—into a bloated and creaking manuscript, into some semblance of narrative form.
Last week at The Idaho Review staff meeting, we sat around tables that formed a square, facing the empty space in the middle. Two editors, a spattering of interns, some staff members, a few undergrads, the dogs, and a bystanding toddler. As we passed around spicy dark chocolate and tortilla chips with cool salsa, we discussed, with reverence, Stephen Dixon. His passing was a profound loss for us. Mitch Wieland, editor-in-chief at TIR, regaled us with anecdotes of his years as Dixon editor and friend—like the time Dixon typed a complete correct sentence and then spent the rest of the communique boasting about it in his enthusiastic but tenderly self-depreciating way, or how Dixon got his first story published at forty and eventually became a professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins. As the chocolate vanished and the chips dwindled, our discussion segued into the validity of a creative writing education and MFA’s in general. One of us spoke up, directing that infamous question to Mitch, to everyone, to Dixon’s spirit, to that open space between tables, to herself: Despite the multitude of programs, you can’t really teach creative writing can you?
As far as Colson Whitehead is concerned, writing is a recipe, and an evolving one. In the November 2019 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, part of Whitehead’s AWP 2019 Keynote Address discusses his longitudinal fried chicken experiment and the evolution of his writing process. By his own admission, he started on the “fried chicken journey” with a Momofuko—a salt-sugar brined chicken that was steamed, then fried, then drizzled with ginger and Thai chilies to create the “bark of heaven.” He moved on from there. A Southern buttermilk breast, a gochujang honey Korean wing. He began to elaborate on the recipes. A dibble and a dabble at a time, he expounded on what he already had in order to create something new.
Over time, my own editing recipe transformed. Gone are Scissorhands afternoons. Now, I will sit in the reading nook, in one of the catty-corner chairs, by the array of hardy plants that line my windowsill in colored pots. Below strings of lights and hanging paper stars, I will read through my printed manuscript out loud, last sentence to first, marking up edits. Then I’ll transfer the re-edited ‘script to pdf and read again, either on phone or tablet, to take that professional published aura (and the authority said aura lends a work) into account.
Currently, I am working on a draft of a story I’ve been solicited to send to a literary journal. In theory, I send over my best work that correlates with the journal’s and the editing author’s particular aesthetic sensibility. In this case, the author soliciting the work has already read a draft of the story I’m revising. I won’t get that first wow that a good, fresh story elicits, when the idea, the language, and the heart can engage a reader in a way that a subsequent draft cannot. By the second read, the audience knows the ending; they know the premise. Does the story still pull itself off when contrasted with the memory of itself? Will it stand the test of sentimentality? Can anything be as good in the present as we remember it? These questions burden me as I look at my current manuscript. Reading backwards and forwards, out loud and in different forms, doesn’t solve the issues this draft needs to overcome before I can send it off. And yet, I don’t want to start from scratch and ruin what magic there is—the flow, the umami, that special and illusive ingredient. My current editing recipe is lacking, something is missing. But what?
Stephen Dixon was intimately aware of the evolution of a manuscript. He composed thirty-five books and over 600 stories on a typewriter. With no spell check. No cut and paste. Often he just used whatever paper he had lying around. Flip over a page of his typed prose and you can see a minimalistic royalty check ($16.50 annually in one we saw) or a medical bill statement sent to his Baltimore residence. This implies an element of thrift. Yet when he revised his works, instead of reaching for white-out to switch a few sentences around, which would have saved paper, he chose to rewrite the whole thing. In editing, Dixon was lush, generous, expansive. Dixon retyped, from beginning to end, whole pages, sometimes many pages. In this way, he was able to deliberately fix what needed to be fixed, while keeping the coherence, the rhythm—that magic that I am worried about losing in my own revisions—which often times gets lost in the endless reshaping and word-pushing that revising by word processor can leave us with. The very idea “word-processing” says it all. I don’t want to process or reprocess my words, I want to craft, shape, spill them onto the page so that they flow, unbroken, unprocessed, whole even in their reshaping.
In his Keynote Address, Whitehead discusses revisiting the initial Momofuko, his first perfect fried chicken. He now knows to let the meat chill overnight, a step he skipped in the past. This addition transforms the end product. A recipe once considered perfect has surpassed its penultimate predecessor. Whitehead says “if you stick with something, over time you get better at it. That’s the hope, anyway. You keep working your craft, whether you’re a plumber or a heart surgeon…Your personality is transformed and that, in turn, transforms your art.” That means a crispy coating is made crispier, a finger-sucking drumstick more finger-sucking. The process of creative writing—from inception to final edit—follows a similar evolutionary arc.
For my current revision, before I send off the requested story, I am taking a page from Dixon and inserting a new step into my revision recipe. I am rewriting entire pages, not just paragraphs or lines. If this works, if this benefits my writing, I’ll keep the technique, it will join my list of processes in sharpie marker. If not, I’ll cast it away, and reach for another ingredient, another brine, another element. Or maybe I’ll just stick with what I’ve got.
During The Idaho Review staff meeting, when one of us asked the question many burn to know—can you teach creative writing?—Mitch responded with as perfect as an answer as I’ve ever heard. “You can certainly accelerate the process,” he said, sage-like, while collecting the papers in front of him with subdued serenity, wearing the raised eyebrows and small, clever smile he uses when he knows he is right. As I examine the way my process has changed over time, I realize Mitch is correct. The MFA exposes us to things we would not have otherwise noticed, in our own work and in the works of others. But it’s not just the MFA. Dixon and his typewriter, Whitehead and his recipes, all potentially shape the way we think, work, and edit. And by tinkering with the way we think and edit, our writing, even our creating—our creative process, and the breadth of our creativity itself—shifts and evolves. Practice becomes habit. Knowledge becomes wisdom. Our writing, like our recipes, grow—golden-brown, meaningful, alluringly spicy, purposeful, and with a hint of unexplainable umami—more perfect than before. Now that sounds delicious.
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Rory Stone Mehlman is a second year MFA candidate at Boise State University where she teaches creative non-fiction and works as an editorial assistant on The Idaho Review.