Elliott, In-class revision ideas

Paul Simon

One of the project first drafts truly stood out to me and gave me some good advice on how to go about revising. Paul Simon said “You have to be patient, just keep erasing what you don’t like. At a certain point it becomes alive, and you know the problems are solvable with solutions you may have used before” (Simon). This quote embodies a theme for revision, and that is that an author must be patient and must get rid of what they don’t like so that they can truly revise.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson

In her explanation of how they chose a villain for the new Kung Fu Panda movie morrors what it takes to truly revise something. “It takes a lot of time to make something real. You look at a scene and go, “Oh man, that doesn’t work,” and then you do it again and again and again. It is an utter marathon” (Nelson). This emphasis on doing things over and over, and how it is a marathon shows an important part of the revision process. This is the need to constantly work at revision and to constantly redo things to make them better.

Tim Burton

The filmmaker Tim Burton gave me another piece of advice that will help my revision process. This is the need to “reserve some time each day for myself to sit and do nothing—stare off into space or doodle or whatever--just be in my own head. That time is very precious for me, and sometimes the characters will strike me in these quiet moments” (Burton). This emphasis on taking a quiet moment to do nothing strikes me as a good way to approach revision. Many times when I’m sitting doing nothing, great ideas for a paper or project leap into my head unbidden. By taking these quiet moments there is the chance that my thoughts for revision will leap into my mind like so many other ideas.