Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Resistance and Revision

I liked this article well enough. It was written well and in a quiet humor, colloquial style. But I don't think I found it very helpful. The resistance to revision is a well-known fact about writing, especially student writers. I thought Skinner did a funny job qualifying it: making jokes on the student who believes in the "organic" poem and the "realness of voice" etc. These sections were funny. And they put a little light to the subject. But this is a subject we're already plenty familiar with. Towards the very end he gives suggestions for tackling revision, which I think is the closest this article came to being helpful. When he gives specific techniques to use or try, I think some of them are useful, but he wrote directed at poetry writers, and some of the suggested techniques are too narrow to apply to fiction.

1 comment:

  1. The thing is that every writer is truly different and I really don't think revision can be the same for everyone. Even though this piece was helpful at some points, it still can't speak for everyone's way of writing and revising

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.