In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 217.
This fall marks fifteen years that I’ve been teaching creative writing in college classrooms, and while the size of each class has varied—sometimes ten students, sometimes twenty-five—along with the frequency of these offerings, which has ranged from two classes annually in graduate school to a steady six now, it’s safe to say that I’ve worked with well over a thousand creative writers since graduating college myself.
And if there’s one story my thousand former students know by heart, it’s the story of how I learned the hard way the necessity of deep, exhaustive revision, particularly surrounding openings.
My horror story is this: In 2009 I was a graduate student, a baby, twenty-two years old in a famous literary Midwestern city where, just several decades prior, Raymond Carver memorably professed himself a part-time writer and full-time drinker. I, too, was courting full-time drinking. There were two bars in the city famous for post-workshop discussion, and I liked to discuss (and drink) after workshop, but also sometimes before. My workshop instructor that year was a storied writer everyone admired, and my peers often regaled one another with stories of the first time they’d ever read his work while I drank and blinked, feeling stupid, because I hadn’t thought to research the faculty before arriving. And yet, as luck would have it, I landed in his workshop—luck is one word for it, privilege another—and one evening, halfway through the discussion of my manuscript, he quieted my classmates’ conversation to insist the fifteen-page essay I had turned in began, very clearly, on page eight.
He held up his copy of my stapled essay, tearing the first seven pages off in one clean chunk.
I was mortified. The beginning, he argued—while “pretty writing overall,” a compliment I seized upon in the hours that immediately followed—did very little for establishing a narrative framework. It was simply a vehicle for movement, existing only to connect one narrative scene to another. It was the second scene that mattered. It was also a scene I’d dreaded when I first sat down to write. Months prior, I’d visited my close friend in his maximum-security prison for the first time after he committed murder, and I was hesitant to confront this on the page, just as I was hesitant to confront this in real life. There was a pedagogical argument for taking a reader through my laborious sixteen-hour drive from the heart of the American Midwest to the Pennsylvania prison where he resided—a sort of imitative, anxiety-inducing road trip—but it was poetic costuming, the famous writer argued, purple prose, beautiful in places and full of imagery that sometimes felt fresh but ultimately did very little for the essay.
Throat-clearing, I call it now: the instinct we have to prepare ourselves, if not the reader, for the true story we have to tell. Just as we clear our throat and shuffle our papers, make small talk and tap the mic when we step up to a podium to give a speech or a reading, call to order a meeting or begin a class or complete our annual physical, so too do we offer poetic costuming when we sit down to write something new. Like that younger version of me, my students know revision is paramount; they also believe, unless they have benefited from the presence of a rigorous creative writing educator, that revision generally means lopping off a few sentences here or there and tightening language in places of needless verbiage.
I consider it my duty, now, to break them of this ideology.
If you are serious about your writing, I tell them, revision becomes an exhaustive process, one that occupies no less than 90 percent of the writing process. To do it well, you need to prepare your heart for heartbreak. You need to prepare your manuscript for surgery. The best advice I have for writers is to cultivate an eye towards substantial initial throat-clearing: Look beyond the first sentence, paragraph, or even the first full page. Look for a moment that often occurs several paragraphs or pages in and proves a far more striking, urgent beginning. Most often now, my own students beat me to it, trained as they are to search deeply and exhaustively for a sentence in possession of, as I explain it, a sparkle, a sharpness. It’s oftentimes very punchy, a piece of art unto itself, a sentence that demonstrates cadence and rhythm and specificity. Oftentimes this sharper opening benefits from a tension created through stark juxtaposition. My favorite, for example, comes from Anna Funder, who writes, “When Hitler came to power I was in the bath.” Other times, it’s a sentence comprised of abrupt minimalism. “The grandmother,” Flannery O’Connor famously wrote, “didn’t want to go to Florida.”
Anything that came before this new opening is very often filler, and while it’s tempting to preserve the earlier material and to engage in literary gymnastics to fold it back in neatly after the new opening has revealed itself, the most dramatic revisions I’ve ever read cut this material entirely. Some of the original language remains only if necessary to summarize—usually in no more than a sentence or two—any crucial information left behind.
My fifteen-page essay began on page eight, and in finding that sentence for me, my mentor delineated the writing I was doing and the writing I was capable of. His words affected not merely the essay he held in his hand—though that, of course, is true—but the necessity of separating myself from my own preciousness, my writing from my story, from paragraphs or even pages that felt important only because I’d penned them.
Here’s my favorite part of the story, for my students and for me: That revision my mentor helped me shape was the first I ever published before selling a book on the same subject to a competitive publisher a few years later. The first sentences are the same.
Amy Butcher is an essayist and the author of two books, including Mothertrucker (Little A, 2021), which explores the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. The book earned critical praise from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the Wall Street Journal, among others, and excerpts of her new book were recently awarded a 2024 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her essays have also been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021 editions of the Best American Essays series. Additional essays have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, the New York Times “Modern Love” column, the New York Times Sunday Review, the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Iowa Review, Literary Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others. She is an associate professor of English at Denison University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska. She splits her time between Columbus, Ohio, and Alaska.
image credit: Wes Hicks