Writing is Revising

So, I'm not going to name names or anything, but I bet a lot of y'all think of writing this way:

You open up a blank word document.
You stare at it.
You go get some Cheetos.
You stare at it some more.
Around 2AM, you frantically write something down.
You turn it in the next day.

This is not how real writers write.

Yes, we use word documents. Yes, we stare at them. Yes we work at 2AM and we eat Cheetos. The difference is, we don't expect to get anything but crap out of ourselves this way.

And there's nothing wrong with producing crap. (See the previous post about giving yourself permission to suck.) But what is really vital is to embrace the fact that writing does not end here.

Will I know how much revising you're doing? Maybe. Maybe not. Will I know if you turn in a paper that you wrote at 2AM the night before? I might know you've turned in a crappy paper, but I won't know the specifics of how it got that way. Does it matter what I know or don't know? Not really.

What I care about is that you turn in good writing.

And good writing is almost always revised writing.

Think about that word: revise. It means to "re-see."

The first time you write a draft--even if you think it's FANTASTIC--there are things about it that you won't see right away. And so at some point, you'll have to re-see it.

How do you re-see things?

I've found that there's nothing better than utilizing an audience. You can find these in various places:

1. The writing center
2. Your peer-review group
3. Your mother
4. Your roommate
5. The class--especially when we do in-class paper discussions and BPRs.
6. Anyone else who loves you enough to read through your stuff

So, here's what the writing process looks like:

1. You stare at the computer for awhile until you write down a lot of crap.
2. You consider yourself your first audience, and you read it out loud. (Reading out loud totally helps, I promise.) You try to re-see the things that should be changed and you change them.
[days may pass]
3. You find another audience. Let's say your peer review group. They read your paper and talk about things you could do to make it better. You go home, try to see it from their point of view, then decide what to change and/or keep. Then you write another draft.
[more days may pass]
4. You find another audience. Maybe the writing center. You listen to what they say. You write another draft.
[even more days may pass]
5. Why not use the class as an audience? (We have in-class paper presentation days specifically for this!) We all tell you what we think you should change. You think about it. You write another draft.
[maybe even weeks will pass]
6. If enough time has passed since you last saw your paper (this usually works best if you haven't looked at if for a week or two), you can look at it with fresh eyes again. Re-see it. Then you can write another draft.

This is how "real" writers write, people. We do not have magic tongues that spew forth golden verbiage on command. Maybe your crazy roommate has that, but normal people don't. This is not something to worry about.

What you do worry about is scheduling in the time. Writing takes time. Revising takes even more time. Finding good readers takes chocolate chip brownies.

If you're good with that, you'll probably be OK here. No matter what kind of "writer" you think you are, the best writers are just the ones who don't stop revising. The ones who don't expect to.