The Joy of Revising

I began last week to reread and revise a manuscript I finished two years ago.  When I finished writing,   I was thoroughly exhausted.  Apparently, even before that I looked as done in as I fwas starting to feel, because one evening, after a class I was taking with him, my rabbi said, You know, you could finish your book and drop dead. The other day, I told him that he'd been more right than wrong about what that manuscript was taking out of me. He did not know, for example, that the only thing I did besides work on the manuscript was to take that class. Oh, I brushed my teeth every morning and showered every night--at least one of which I neglected when I was writing my first novel several decades ago.

So tired was I when I finished the book, that I put it away without making any changes or even reading it through. 

Last week, I decided it was time to print out the manuscript and see if time had lent me enough distance to decide if it was good and, if I thought it was, to revise it productively. Some years ago I heard my brother, who is also a writer, say that it was important, in revising a manuscript, not to "dis-improve" it. The word's not in my dictionaries, but it is a fine word. And in reworking any of my writing, I always keep it in mind, just behind the forefront. For it has to be there, or one may start to fiddle too much with what works. Mostly, to me, revising means cutting out the flab I notice, and moving some phrases around so the reader doesn't have to read sentences two or three times to understand them. Because reading a book shouldn't involve manual labor.

I've read and revised 129 pages so far. And the experience is giving me joy. I'd forgotten that part: how it feels to do the actual work of making something you wrote, better. Joy--one word I won't need to revise.