August 8, 2024
by Dianne Aprile, creative nonfiction faculty
“Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.”
–Richard Hugo
The poet Richard Hugo published those lines many decades ago to underscore the necessity of flexibility and revision in the writing process. Presumably heeding his own advice, Hugo used a pencil to jot down his first-draft thoughts on the subject. But if ever there was good reason to trade lead for ink, this final version of Hugo’s hard-earned rule is it. His words deserve the permanence of a waterproof, indelible ultra-bold Sharpie.
Why? Well, because his message is so important, there should be no risk of it being rubbed out or overlooked.
Hugo’s demand that we never consider anything we compose to be a final version is not only extraordinarily good advice to writers but to all of us, day by day, year by year, as we compose and revise the storylines of our lives.
A bit of background: I like to use metaphors with my students as a way to push open the sometimes sticky doors that lead to the mastery of craft. I once offered up the image of a bakery case crowded with slices of different types of cake to help a student comprehend the variety of flavors that reflection can take on in a personal essay. Imagine pineapple upside down cake as flashback; coconut cream as reverie; Charlotte Russe, a digression circumscribed in italics; Italian wedding cake, a flash-forward; chocolate mousse, an epiphany. You can step back from narrative action and reflect in any of these ways, selecting the strategic slice that best suits your needs (or tastes) in the moment.
It was in that vein that I began to ponder Hugo’s quotation regarding revision.
Revision, as he implies, is where real poetry happens. Real writing of any kind, I would add. Yet students, particularly when faced with fast-approaching deadlines for critical papers or creative theses, often feel that a call for one more round of revision signifies a failure on their part—rather than an opportunity, which it always is.
As Hugo suggests, writing—by its very nature—demands of the writer a willingness to undergo change. To accept it as a given. Like a round of dough waiting to become bread, an early draft requires shaping and reshaping, pushing and pulling, a rest, then back to the board again. On and on and on until a final version arises from the fire, transformed, tantalizing, tasty.
So it is with our individual lives. In fact, human life may be the very best metaphor for the process of composing a poem or a play or an essay. Living is an act of becoming. To live deeply, one has to accept the challenge to be transformed, to stop clinging to the already done, the status quo—to let go of the first draft of one’s life, if you will. Or even the second or third drafts.
In my own experience, I have come to see both the necessity and the rewards of what I’ll call personal revision. What I once felt certain would be the final setting of my life, in rather short order was wildly revised at the age of sixty. After decades of putting down roots in one place, a treasured hometown, the landscape of my life suddenly shifted across the continent to a very different location. A new place, new characters, new sounds and scents and plotlines. One where I had no roots at all. One with a history I knew very little about, an unfamiliar (though enticing) geography, a population three times what I was used to (with traffic to match), and a culture that shared little in common with that of the place where I was born, raised, schooled, married, and employed over the course of six decades Where ninety-nine percent of the significant scenes of my life had played out. Where I wrote, and where I was read.
I made the choice to move to Seattle willingly, but that didn’t mean the decision wasn’t painful, nor the process of becoming a Pacific Northwesterner bewildering at times—the shift from hometown “known quantity” to new-town “nobody.” I was forced to follow that over-used axiom often passed on to writers in the revision stage: Kill your darlings. My darlings being my attachments to the familiar, the comfortable, the predictable, the expected, the accustomed, the habitual. I had to embrace a new version of my story, amend the specifics. Not just a dramatic setting shift was called for, but a major fork in the road of my own character development. I had to rethink my public identity, readjust my ties to family, re-cement friendships, take on new conflicts, repurpose old strengths, and most importantly, let go of one view of my life’s trajectory in order to move forward effectively into a revised storyline. I needed to trim but also elaborate. Pare back yet branch out. Take risks. At times, in the middle of it, I felt lost. All I could do was keep pushing the pencil across each page of the calendar.
It took time, patience, practice, disappointment, courage, shoulders to cry on, a willingness to expose and reveal, a toughening of my skin, and most of all the letting go of some of what I thought I couldn’t live without. A physical nearness to dear old friends, for example. Territorial knowledge (i.e., knowing how to drive to the grocery without a GPS). The small sensory details of setting that are the essence of everyday life. Clatter of crickets on summer nights. Mockingbird’s echo at four am. The drift of a river. A firefly’s flicker.
As long as I clung solely to those elements of the earlier drafts of my life, I would never find my way into the next one. I would be stuck. But with time and effort, a lot of rewriting of my own internal narrative, and the metaphorical murder of some of my darlings (goodbye cicadas, hello salmon-glutted creeks; farewell lazy river, howdy-do Puget Sound), I found myself living a life revised. New characters peopling it. New conflicts complicating it. New landscapes comforting me, imbuing my dreams. And a new vocabulary (sunbreaks!) and fresh rhythms (first there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is …) deepening the pace and poetry of each day.
Yes, the early drafts—all the work and hard-earned experience that went into them—were and are still an essential part of me. That’s the good news about revision. What’s let go is never really missing from the next draft.
And so, today, more than a decade after leaving my hometown for a place in America as far away as one can get from here, I am back in Louisville, surrounded by old friends, familiar haunts, creating a new draft of my life story. Not surprisingly, much changed while I was gone, and the setting that made me who I am is now remaking me into who I am becoming. The city itself has undergone revision. The community I’ve re-entered has rewritten pages of itself, as communities do. The family and friends and geography I had to let go of I now embrace again, deepening my understanding of their motivations, learning how to depict them more compellingly.
Richard Hugo, a poet beloved in the Pacific Northwest, whose name is synonymous with Seattle’s sprawling community of writers, was so accurate when he urged his readers forty-five years ago in The Triggering Town: “Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words.”
Reaching deep into my extended metaphor, I can agree with Hugo. I would like to think I am now prepared to revise again, if required, if desired—should the opportunity arise.
And yes, you can write that down in indelible ink.
Dianne Aprile is the author of several nonfiction books as well as essays, book reviews, and poems, including this summer in The Louisville Review and Still: A Journal. She is creator and curator of the Poetry Trail in Louisville’s Parklands of Floyds Fork.
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