GPT-4's Guide to Effective Revision Strategies for Writers
As writers, we often think of the first draft as the most important part of the writing process. We sit down with a notebook or a blank screen and keyboard and put our brilliant thoughts down one letter at a time. However, the real work and fun of writing is in the revision stage. Revision is not just about fixing or improving a draft, but gaining a new perspective on it that awakens you to the possibilities and excites you to make necessary changes. In this article, we will explore ten revision strategies that can help you gain a fresh perspective on your writing and take it to the next level.
Table of Contents:
1. Leave Your Poem Alone
2. Write from Memory
3. Change the Size of Your Poem
4. Banish Figurative Language
5. Read Your Work Out Loud
6. Verbalize Your Work
7. Write in a New Lexical Repertoire
8. Change the Shape of Your Poem
9. Experiment with Different Mediums
10. Embrace Controlled Chaos
1. Leave Your Poem Alone
One of the best things you can do for your poem is to leave it alone for a while. Put it in a drawer or a folder far away from your desktop and let it sit. Take a walk, build a birdhouse, glaze your wheelbarrow with rainwater, do anything else for as long as you reasonably can. Leaving a poem alone lets you gain a kind of critical distance. You forget the labor of committing that first draft to paper and come back to it with fresh eyes. You're not critiquing a poem you wrote; you're critiquing a poem some goofball version of you from six years ago wrote. In that case, there's really no need for emotional turmoil. Leaving a poem alone for a while is my first and best strategy.
2. Write from Memory
If you don't have two months to ignore a poem, try writing from memory. Write your poem on a sheet of paper or its digital equivalent and then flip the paper over or close the window. Put it completely out of sight, maybe get up for a drink of water to distract your short-term memory for a second, and then come back and do your best to write your poem again from memory. The goal here is not to test your ability to recall tiny details, but to let your own fallible memory filter out the drab, dull, and forgettable lines in your original poem. Odds are that the things that end up in the from-memory version will be the livelier, more unexpected, and more memorable parts. The things that lingered in your mind will probably be the things that will linger in a reader's mind.
3. Change the Size of Your Poem
One great way to get a new perspective on a poem is to just change its size radically. It's not the same poem if it's way shorter or longer than the one you started out with. Tinker too much all at once, and you and your poem will twist yourselves into a tight glutenous knot of intractable literary misery. When that happens, or better yet, before that happens, the best thing to do is just walk away. Write your poem and then put it in a drawer or some folder far away from your desktop and just let it sit. But don't think about it either. Take a walk, build a birdhouse, glaze your wheelbarrow with rainwater, do anything else for as long as you reasonably can. The idea is that leaving a poem alone lets you gain a kind of critical distance.
4. Banish Figurative Language
Figurative language is baked into the poetic tradition. Poems have metaphors, and sometimes poems are metaphors. But at other times, though, poems are very literal and specific descriptions of a moment. Your draft will probably fall somewhere on that spectrum, and you can get yourself into a revisionary viewing position by moving the slider on figurative language for your poem. What would happen, for example, if you took all the stuff that your poem is about, the tall grass, the little creek, the swaying trees near your childhood home, and restricted it only to the title? What if then the rest of the poem had to be about something totally different but metaphorically related to your childhood? By stripping out the metaphor, you may recognize weaknesses in your imagery that you overlooked while you were doing the abstract metaphorical work of the initial draft.
5. Read Your Work Out Loud
One of the biggest favors writers can do for themselves is to read their own work out loud to themselves. There's not a piece of writing in the last several years that I've submitted, published, or presented without reading it out loud to myself. It's such an undervalued hack for getting more out of your writing. The key here is that you're recruiting different senses to process your work. When you read silently, you're using vision. When you read out loud, you're recruiting your lungs, your mouth, your ears. It's an entirely different sensory experience, and those other senses are attuned to language and thought in different ways.
6. Verbalize Your Work
Beyond reading your work out loud, just verbalizing it in any way, even explaining it to someone, can make all kinds of difference. Sometimes you can get all tangled up in trying to write something that you manage not to write it at all. For a lot of people, it can be easier to process and express ideas by saying them. So say what you want to write about, explain what you're trying to do with the poem, and then let that explanation lead you through the process of writing it.
7. Write in a New Lexical Repertoire
What would happen if you required yourself to write your poem with a whole new lexical repertoire? What if that poem about a fishing trip with your grandfather has to unfold without words like fish, rod, reel, and grandfather? Obviously, you're going to have to adopt a new perspective on the poem if you're going this route. If we take friend of the show Kenneth Burke's argument about terministic screen seriously, forcing yourself to write with all new words will shape your perception of the poem in significant and new ways.
8. Change the Shape of Your Poem
The shape of a poem can make all the difference for how you experience it. Gain a new perspective by putting it in a different shape. For poets who are trying out received forms like the sonnet or the villanelle, the first draft can look like reasonably competent exercises in meter and rhyme that also lack all the spark of real poetry. Worse still, you might find yourself practicing your best 19th-century style mangling of syntax in order to get those rhyming words to march in order at the ends of lines. In cases like those, releasing the strictures of form for a while can help you to find what's really going on in that poem, to really clarify its lyrical gesture without all the distractions of the rules.
9. Experiment with Different Mediums
We live in a world where things like audio poetry with recorded voices and sound effects are a possibility. What happens to your poem when you exercise your sound engineer skills? If you conceive of your poem not as something someone will read but that they'll listen to, what changes in your approach to writing it? Or what if you turn it into a cinematic poem in video form? What kinds of footage would complement your lyrical imagery in meaningful ways? What could the additional channels of audiovisual information add to your poem? How might they distract? Think of your poem not just as an idea transcribed but as a material or digital object.
10. Embrace Controlled Chaos
Finally, don't be afraid to embrace controlled chaos. Maybe you want to write your piece from a different point of view or as an imitation of another poem that you love. Maybe you reimagine your poem as a crossword puzzle. There's really not a wrong way to do this. The creative sky is in fact the limit, and with that, you've got a lot of different revision tricks you could try out. So go ahead and give them a shot.
In conclusion, revision is not just about fixing or improving a draft, but gaining a new perspective on it that awakens you to the possibilities and excites you to make necessary changes. By leaving your poem alone, writing from memory, changing the size of your poem, banishing figurative language, reading your work out loud, verbalizing your work, writing in a new lexical repertoire, changing the shape of your poem, experimenting with different mediums, and embracing controlled chaos, you can gain a fresh perspective on your writing and take it to the next level.
Highlights:
- Revision is not just about fixing or improving a draft, but gaining a new perspective on it.
- Leaving a poem alone lets you gain a kind of critical distance.
- Reading your work out loud is an undervalued hack for getting more out of your writing.
- Verbalizing your work can help you to clarify your ideas and lead you through the process of writing.
- Changing the shape of a poem can make all the difference for how you experience it.
- Experimenting with different mediums can add new dimensions to your poem.
- Embracing controlled chaos can help you to find what's really going on in your poem.
FAQ:
Q: What is revision?
A: Revision is the process of taking a draft and making it better by changing it in some way. It is not just about fixing or improving a draft, but gaining a new perspective on it that awakens you to the possibilities and excites you to make necessary changes.
Q: What are some revision strategies?
A: Some revision strategies include leaving your poem alone, writing from memory, changing the size of your poem, banishing figurative language, reading your work out loud, verbalizing your work, writing in a new lexical repertoire, changing the shape of your poem, experimenting with different mediums, and embracing controlled chaos.
Q: Why is reading your work out loud important?
A: Reading your work out loud is important because it recruits different senses to process your work. When you read silently, you're using vision. When you read out loud, you're recruiting your lungs, your mouth, your ears. It's an entirely different sensory experience, and those other senses are attuned to language and thought in different ways.
Q: What is controlled chaos?
A: Controlled chaos is the idea of embracing chaos in a deliberate and controlled way. It involves experimenting with different approaches to writing, such as writing from a different point of view or as an imitation of another poem that you love. It can help you to find what's really going on in your poem and lead you to new discoveries.
Resources:
- https://www.voc.ai/product/ai-chatbot (AI Chatbot product)
