I feel as if I have done nothing since the residency, which is, of course, not true but for some reason this revision is crawling along. You know what they say about 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. Well, I'm sweating, that's for sure.
So I'm back to empathetic questioning. I've written about this before and it really helps me when I go to revise. Personally, I think that the main revision goal for me is deepening, which is why I like Carol Bly's chapter about empathetic questioning so much (see her Beyond the Writers' Workshop). So this is not for the time when you want to polish up the craft aspect of your piece. This is for moving further into the emotional heart of the piece. As Bly puts it, it is "a kind, cool-handed tool, not just to encourage our imagination, but to fend off all enemies of our deeper selves, enemies that include our shallow selves" (BWW, 51).
Here are the five steps for engaging in this form of deepening, according to Carol Bly:
1. Decide to hear your own or others' (perhaps your characters') thoughts without challenging them.
2. Empty yourself of your own point of view or any association of yours that comes to mind as the speaker speaks (even if the speaker is you -- this process is non-judgmental).
3. Ask the person who just spoke (or yourself, if it’s you) some open-ended questions (not yes-or-no questions) about what he or she just said. The goal here is to bring the speaker closer to herself or himself, not to slide them into agreement with you or anyone else.
4. In your own words, paraphrase what the person has just said, as you understand it.
5. Help the person look forward and plan ahead free-spiritedly. “Okay. Given those data, feelings, and meanings you’ve just reported, what do you see as a good direction to take from here? What might some of your goals be for now and for the future?”
That's how it would look if it were an interaction. So to use this as a revision tool, you approach the work as if you are interacting. "In writing creative nonfiction, we ask these questions of our various selves," says Bly. For fiction writers, "we would ask these questions of our characters" (50).
The questions are meant to move us not only deeper, but more to the particular. As AJ also suggested (see Bug's account of the revision workshop), we need to get more concrete, less abstract. Bly suggests changing plurals and generics to singulars and specifics.
And finally, a question for memoir writers to ask themselves: "Here I have written this bit of memoir. Which value of mine does it come from?" (BWW, 58).
Thanks, Carol Bly.
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4 comments:
This is fascinating! It also sounds very therapeutic. I know I could use the "hear your own thoughts without challenging them" advice just about every second of the day. And I think that this is a wonderful first step in the revision process--much better than jumping right into polishing pros. I will definitely bookmark this page and return when I am revising (submission #3).
Thanks!
This was very interesting and I loved that you stopped by.
Almost our birthday!
XXOO
your twin ;)
This was interesting for me. In poetry, the three questions are 1. Who is the speaker of this poem 2. What is the speaker saying 3. How does the speaker feel about what's being said. They're especially used to clarification, but question 3 is useful for deepening as well.
I've got to remember to get Bly's book- As you know, deepening is my issue too this semester. I have no idea if I actually accomplished it in my revision, but I tore that story apart! It did feel good to get it in the mail, now moving on to the new & nervously awaiting AJ's comments. Hope you're well ti!
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