Lily Hoang’s Revision Workshop Part 2

This is a series of posts from Lily Hoang and her students on how Hoang teaches revision workshops. I’ll leave Hoang’s post at the top and the student post below. This second student reflection on the revision workshop is by Allie Field Bell. As always, if you’d like to contribute a guest post, you can reach me at m [dot] salesses [at gmail etc.]

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From Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary, Changing, and other books:

WHEN I TEACH AN MFA WORKSHOP, I run three rounds of workshop. I have various permutations story requirements, but the last time I taught it, the three were: a call for submissions (for either Fiction International or Tin House); a one-on-one workshop; and a revision workshop. The students responded really positively to all three.

I’m only going to be talking about the revision here. But let me start by saying that in the traditional workshop, the writer leaves with a bunch of conflicting advice and critiques and no real instruction on what to do—like, actually what to do. They’re just expected to have a revision—as if by magic!—for the final portfolio, maybe. So, this was my way around that whole business.

For the revision workshop, students were required to submit both a story that has been workshopped (in its original form) and its revision. Students were asked to provide marginalia for the revision only, but their end notes were to foreground the process of revision and background the end product. Discussion in class was also focused on the writer’s process of revision.

As the instructor, this workshop was revelatory. Not only was it impressive to witness how my students approach revision, it was also humbling to participate in this development.

So, to be honest, some students made radical revisions, where the revision was almost unrecognizable from the original, and other students did line edits. For the latter, the workshop was surprisingly harsher, e.g. pointing to weaknesses in the original that were not addressed adequately in revision. Regardless, the process was thrilling and elucidating.

Teaching a revision workshop entirely changed my approach to revision. Mind you, I’ve written books, like quite a few, and I thought I understood revision, but I didn’t. Whereas it’s still something of a mystical act for me, my students taught me how to re-conceptualize. And they gave me—and each other—practical approaches and theoretical approaches and sometimes irrelevant approaches, but mostly, I think we all gained a few strategies to approach the daunting task of revision.

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From Allie Field Bell:

I SHOULD BEGIN BY ADMITTING that revision has never been my favorite part of the writing process. I have no idea how many workshops, craft talks or professors have expounded the pleasure and virtue of revision. To which, my reply was always, stubbornly, naively: when I have something worthy of revision, I’ll revise it. A chronic case of trial and waste-basket error—I took the kill your little darlings credo a little too seriously.

I should also admit that now, in my older, marginally wiser state, I am beginning to, if not enjoy, than appreciate revision for its role in the magic that is story-making. And I think I owe a considerable debt to the revision workshop model introduced to / forced upon me by my professor and mentor, Lily Hoang.

The first aspect of the revision workshop that perhaps goes without saying is that it forces students to consider revision as part of the semester’s generative practice. A miraculous thing happens with deadlines: you produce work! The way Lily runs the workshop means two new stories, one revision, which has a kind of equalizing effect on my brain—the revision becomes just a valuable and worthy as the new and shiny workshop story.

But the philosophical shift doesn’t end here, Lily also schedules revision workshops so that we have more discussion time for each story. And she very strongly encourages the writer whose work is being discussed to begin the conversation with some thoughts about his or her approach to this revision. So, the revised story of the semester is not only equal in value and therefore equally deserving of time / effort / anxiety, but it is in many ways even higher stakes. It is not merely the gift of the workshop story (as my former professor, K.L. Cook called it), but it is a gift wrapped in layers of soon-to-be articulated intentionality.

So not only do I have to write the story and revise the story, I am also expected to have some degree of intelligible self-reflection on its transformation from draft to draft. Which means adding a layer of self-reflexivity that was not so much absent before as it was pleasantly submerged in an intuition attributed parenthetical, somewhere between penned up draft in hand and fresh word document on screen. Which means, again, I’m assaulted with a brand new side of the same old story, a re-envisioned revision.

But the reason this is so essential in the workshop itself is because this whole paradigm shift applies not only to my own work, but to the works of my colleagues as well. From one draft to the next, I am tasked with a new reading experience, one that requires I carefully consider the decisions the writer made to alter the story at hand. Sometimes these alterations are drastic—exchanging one focal character for another, cutting ten pages, adding fifteen—and other times they are seemingly minute—shifting the function of commas in one paragraph—but regardless, I am made to pay attention, to read closely and as a writer, not an MFA workshop student. And this distinction is, in my humble opinion, one of the most important things I’ve learned here in graduate school.

I will not make any claim to expertise in the matter but as a five-year undergraduate / graduate writing workshop attendee, schooled in the traditional Iowa workshop model, I have unintentionally narrowed my expectations of what can be learned by reading my colleagues’ stories. Of course, there is always something new and exciting that emerges from every new story I read, but often I find myself reading in ways that support my own role as a critic in workshop. I read less for writerly decisions, more for craft-oriented feedback. Is this character well-developed? Or, drawing on my own revision workshop story: what does Emily’s obsession with the lavender crème brulee say about her obsession with Marie? And how does cutting that scene entirely affect the pacing of the story?

These are, of course, important questions, ones that arise naturally and dynamically from the revision workshop—like one of those visual perception puzzles where you have to identify what is missing or changed from one image to the next. But the reading experience extends beyond the detective work, the reading experience is revelatory in what it exposes about the writer’s decisions and the reader’s perception of those decisions in relation to her own approach to story. Why cut the crème brulee scene? What does it say about the writer’s approach to portraying this obsession with Marie? Is it, perhaps, because the writer is compelled by a degree of mystery, that in the first draft’s excess of details, seems to be lacking? Or is it an issue of redundancy? Is it truly an issue of pacing and if so, what does the change imply in terms of the writer’s priorities?

This is a reading experience of possibilities, and it is appropriately inspired by a workshop that embraces possibilities in its very definition. Because ultimately, the revision workshop is generative in the sense that it generates new possibilities for what we consider revision. There are drafts that closely resemble each other, that announce themselves clearly as derivative of some former vision of story, and there are drafts that seem to cling only slightly to their previous incarnation, a sentence, a paragraph, a concept. And the joy of revision workshop: I am faced with all of them. I am exposed to possibilities of revision that I could not have accessed in even the most insightful craft essay / mentor’s advice.

Because ultimately, there is some intuitive piece to writing that cannot be cataloged or axiomatized, that must be experienced as reading or revising, as an endless series of questions that challenge and inspire our overwhelming investment in words and what they can do on the page.

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Photo: Flickr/Angel Arcones