Bao Le - Revision tips from the Professional World

TC Boyle:

Mr. Boyle revises his works during it’s creation and then afterwards before he finalizes it. He would revise the pages that he has finished the day after he writes it and then again when the novel is completed. This technique is useful but seems a little time consuming, which Mr. Boyle states in his section. The process used to take him around a month but nowadays it only takes him a couple of days. He alludes to the fact that back then, he did much more work revising and nowadays, he doesn’t revise as much. While there might be a correlation with revision and good writing (he states that his best-known novel was written back during this time), he probably feels that careful revision isn’t necessarily needed for his writing anymore. This technique of revision that he presents is pretty much the one they teach in grade school though.

Ben Katchor:

Mr. Katchor draws much of his inspiration from people on the subway. Afterwards, he writes a story and draws it out. By drawing it out immediately, he gets a feel for what is useful in the script and what isn’t. The drawing process is very quick and he rushes straight to the inking and the painting. I think that this says much about his comic style in which he places a bit more value in the script than the drawing. The script is revised through the art, but the art itself is never revised. This style of revision tells me that he sees the process as being very fluid. This is useful because he mentions a technique of using the writing process to continually improve on things that you may have already completed. This way, the writing can have much better flow.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson:

Miss Nelson identified the most important part of the story and worked on making sure that it was the best part about it. She puts a lot of emphasis on the character and makes sure that it is perfect before she even thinks about the rest. The amount of detail that they put into the character is a little bit on the extreme side. This is useful because she identified the important parts of the work and concentrated on fleshing them out before they started on the rest of it. Making sure that the most important parts of the work is the one that gets the most attention is a pretty simplistic approach. It’s useful if you have plenty of time and if there is a chance that it would get lost in the noise. This might be useful in my writing to make sure that my audiences get the point of my work and not get lost in the details.