After many days or weeks of writerly slovenliness, Puntitas has done some revision. Last night, she worked on one of the poems she’s been revising lately, the one she discovered to be absolutely incoherent ten years after it was finished. The changes are still more than surface-level editing, but they’re no longer about changing the whole direction of the piece. After last night’s session, Puntitas thinks the poem will change very little from now on.
Today she also worked on a nonfiction prose piece she considered done. Its “done”-ness was determined ten years ago, so Puntitas believed it prudent to read it before launching it into the world.
As far as revisions go, most of what Puntitas did was surface-level, cutting wordiness, getting details to match up, clarifying vagueness, and removing repetition. While she’s happy with that work, she’s not willing to say the piece is done. Her plan had been to read the piece from beginning to end without tinkering, but she started to notice the sort of little glitches that are easy to forget, so she tinkered as she went along, losing all sense of the voice and tension of the piece. She’ll need to read it again in a day or two because she isn’t sure that the narrator’s central problem is clearly set up, explained, or resolved. The sections that are supposed to do that may not do enough and may commit the additional sin of interfering with pacing.
On a personal level, the piece made Puntitas cry, not that her writing is particularly moving, rather that the problem is still unresolved for her, a state of things which she knows, but was not expecting to react to so strongly. The piece may require an objective reader after some revision.
Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.
