Are You Revising, or Reshuffling?
How to clarify the Why, How, Who, and Where of your Creative Perspective
Hi Everyone,
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it nearly impossible to focus on my writing for the past 2 weeks. Every few minutes, excitement prompts me to refresh my feeds of the latest polls, to check for the latest breaking news about Zoom calls and new endorsements for Kamala Harris. It suddenly feels safe— even exhilarating— to breathe again!
But all this happy, relieved distraction yanks me away from writing and revising the books that constitute my real job. I tell myself that it will get easier if and when the election is over and democracy is safe again. Still, I have work to do now, whatever November may bring.
The problem, in this state of distraction, is that it’s very easy to lose and/or doubt one’s creative perspective. Where was I going? What was I saying? Who’s the audience for this, again? After a morning of non-writerly diversion, it can be tempting to jump back into the work of revision as if the creative pathways will clear themselves. But that often leads, I find, to a cross between panic and despair as the lines on the page or screen jumble incoherently. And the inevitable question arises: Am I just rearranging verbal deck chairs on the Titanic of a doomed project?
At this point I tell myself to take a deep breath and step back to review the project as a whole. It’s always worth investing a few minutes to re-calibrate one’s creative perspective before deciding whether and how to move forward.
Here’s how this process of re-calibration works.
What is Creative Perspective?
As a writer and teacher of writing, I’m all too familiar with the danger of reshuffling rather than revising. First, the sense of pointlessness sounds. Then the urge to abandon ship begins to ring. But that urge is usually a false alarm.
Now, I’m not opposed to shelving projects. I often lay my own projects aside for months at a time while I focus on paying ghost gigs. I also have drawers full of defunct stories, essays, and book manuscripts, many of which never made it to a complete first draft. Some would make me cringe if I read them today, but I keep them as artifacts and also as potential kindling, should I ever ignite the specific creative perspective that they lacked.
Because Creative Perspective is the critical element that either buoys or sinks any troubled writing project. And the reason we spend so much time reshuffling those deckchairs, whether we realize it or not, is that we need to clarify this perspective.
In the simplest terms, I’m talking about your point of view as an author. But there’s really nothing simple about it. Your creative perspective directs your vision, your voice, your sense of purpose and destination as you write. It controls the content of your work and frames its meaning. When you lose perspective, you’re sailing blind.
At the risk of stretching this metaphor beyond its breaking point, if your perspective is blocked by a giant iceberg that you cannot get around, you’d best abandon ship. But if it’s only blocked by the deck chairs between you and the cockpit, a little rearrangement might just save the voyage.
Unfortunately, if you’re sailing blind, you probably can’t see what’s blinding you. Fortunately, there are four key questions that can help you figure out just how much trouble you’re really in — and what you need to do about it.
1. Why does it matter?
Every piece of writing that I’ve published has had an “abiding question” that would not let me drop it. Who dunnit? Why’d they do it? What are the consequences? And, especially, why do I care so much? This question gives the project its central purpose.
Sometimes the purpose is assigned to me. As a ghostwriter, I find it easier to keep track of the focus when it’s in my job description. To give narrative shape to someone else’s life story, for instance, or to make an academic target of research sexy to a mainstream audience.
With my own work, the point can be more elusive, subject to fits of frustration, confusion, and despair. That’s when I stop, push the deck chairs aside, and peer back to the inception of the project. What inspired me? What did I think I was writing about? What have I discovered since then? Do I still care enough to keep connecting the dots? Do I still believe that a meaningful picture will emerge?
My last novel, Glorious Boy, took me 17 years to write. What kept me going was the dream that woke me up in the very beginning and gave me my opening scene. I had to finish this book so I’d know what that dream meant and what made it so powerful. That dream shaped my creative perspective and, for me, was the point of writing the book.
2. How far can you see?
Writers are world builders. Doesn’t matter whether you’re writing about your childhood bedroom, a trip across Siberia, or the evolution of bitcoins. You’ve got to bring the world of your story to life so your readers can see it.
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