Peter Ho Davies Believes Revision Is a Mindset

In this interview, Ruth Joffre talks with Peter Ho Davies about his craft book ‘The Art of Revision,’ how to interpret feedback, and how to navigate the pressures of publishing.

For creative writers, Graywolf’s “The Art of . . .” series of craft books has offered up some of the most insightful, thought-provoking writings on our craft available today. This series includes work from renowned and award-winning writers like Edwidge Danticat, Carl Phillips, and Charles Baxter, the latter of which helms the series as editor. The latest addition to the series is also one of the finest, Peter Ho Davies’ The Art of Revision.

What struck me about the book was its intimacy. Its foundation is not in prompts and exercises but in the self and in the capacity of a writer to understand the self’s relation to the revision process. Peter Ho Davies guides readers through a lifetime of thinking on the topic of revision, using the examples he has collected in his time as a writer, teacher, and reader. The end result is a craft book that teaches how to revise by demonstrating how to think about the concept of revision—on the page, in the world, and in life.

In this interview, we discuss attaining the mindset of revision, how to give and interpret feedback, how to navigate the pressures of publishing, and more.

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Ruth Joffre: The Art of Revision is the latest in the “The Art of . . .” series from Graywolf, which explores important and, often, abstract topics related to writing, such as recklessness, subtext, and death. At first glance, revision would seem to be one of the more tactical subjects in the series. Yet, as you write, it’s more about one’s mindset than specific tips and tricks. How did you come to select this topic and to approach it in this way?

Peter Ho Davies: I was drawn to the topic through my teaching and the sense that many of my writing students, including some of the most talented and advanced, were anxious and uncertain about revision. We could have a great workshop discussion, and a terrific follow-up meeting in office hours, and it was clear they had a sense of what might be improved in a story and some sense of how to move forward . . . and yet they often didn’t or reported difficulty starting on revision. It was frustrating for them, perplexing for me, and it seemed to call for a different approach, a more expansive outlook that went beyond the idea of revision as a to-do list of things to fix. Many issues on such lists, of course, are addressable by various specific skills—how to handle time, how to sharpen a scene, issues of style or diction—but that can make revision seem like simply a catchall term for the application of other techniques, techniques that many of my students already had a good grasp of. What I began to wonder is if revision might also be a skill or technique of its own—a mindset, indeed, which might ask us to revise ourselves as much as our work—and that’s what spurred the more expansive approach in the book.

RJ: The foundational example of revision in your book is of a moment from your childhood, a moment you have returned to several times in the course of your career, rewriting it in a number of different ways. This process happened naturally but could also be useful as an exercise: to deliberately write a scene or an image multiple ways. What strategies do you have for making content drawn from the same well feel fresh each time and for keeping yourself interested as a writer?

PHD: Revision—reseeing—is often an act of defamiliarization. That can be affected by changing aspects of our writing/reading process from draft to draft—writing in longhand, reading aloud, writing in a new location, at a new time of day, etc., etc.—but also by recontextualizing our material, for example, in time or place. In the book, I chart a haphazard, organic process whereby a personal experience in 1980s England gets transposed in my novels first to 1930s Berlin and in a later work to 1980s Detroit. An earlier story of mine appears in the US and UK editions of my collection Equal Love in distinct versions, one set in the US, the other in the UK—an act of revision or even translation (between idioms if not languages in this particular case). I stumbled into these various moves, but they do hint at strategies I now offer to students to relocate a story in a different place (the Australian setting of the movie Jindabyne, a version of the Carver story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” is another example I draw on) or time (say, shifting a story back and forth across specific temporal horizons—the pandemic, 9/11, even the advent of a certain technology). These shifts, of course, also imply movement in POV, another rich device for revision illustrated in the book by examples from Wells Tower and Frank O’Connor, among others.

RJ: In the first chapter of the book, you revise the famous dictum “Write what you know” to “Write to know.” This speaks to an approach that I often take in my work: writing from a place of unknowing or not yet conscious intent. This can be scary for writers, especially when staring down a blank page. What are some of your favorite strategies for starting to write without knowing what you want to write?

PHD: I’m not sure I—or anyone—ever quite starts without knowing, or more accurately thinking they know, what they want to write, but that initial idea is often fuzzy, vague, limited . . . which is to say in need of revision. We write therefore to know more, to know better, which is one reason I suggest measuring progress not always in terms of word or page count but in the more basic sense of “Do I understand my work—my plot, my characters, my themes—a little better today than yesterday?” If I have a core strategy, it’s to consider what I start with as a hypothesis, a theory—I think this is a story, I think it goes something like this—and a draft as an experiment to test that hypothesis. A theory in that sense isn’t knowledge, isn’t settled, isn’t known. It’s provisional, speculative . . . and as such open to the modification of revision.

Revision—reseeing—is often an act of defamiliarization.

RJ: In several places in the book, you note that writing in general and revision in particular often require certain luxuries the industry takes for granted: time, space, a computer (to say nothing of internet bills, submission fees, subscriptions, and so on). What advice do you have for those who do not have these luxuries or are navigating revision with limited time, space, and resources?

PHD: I do discuss the idea that time—our key resource—to revise is a kind of privilege, not afforded all writers, but I’d actually suggest that the “industry”—some aspects of publishing, at least—don’t take that time for granted, as anyone who’s ever written to a deadline can attest. I cite Neil Gaiman in the book, noting that when he worked in comics there was very little time to revise, and I’d venture the same has been true in other popular genres (sci-fi in the heyday of the pulps, say). Just the other day I was watching a big Hollywood blockbuster and thinking—as we all have—how much better it might have been if the writers had simply been given more time. On the other hand (and in the rather lower-stakes financial context of my own career), I’ve been blessed to have editors and agents who’ve granted me the gift of patience. I’m also in a slightly different writing-adjacent “industry”—academia—which, while it has its own deadline pressures (publish or perish), also affords me time. It’s typical—I’ve done it myself—for writers in academia to lament the immediate tensions between writing and teaching, but I also appreciate that my steady job has allowed me the time to make my books the way I want them. It’s a truism that time is money, but sometimes for writers, if we’re lucky, money (in the form of grants, fellowships, advances, etc.) is time. That’s its own luxury, of course, but I can also still recall, when I was starting out as a writer with little of either, that time could be found—not necessarily time in the form of uninterrupted hours at the desk, to be sure—but time to think about my writing, while commuting to work, while lying in bed at night, while reading. That’s not useful time to generate new pages, perhaps, but for me at least it was time to keep turning over my work in my mind, time that could go toward productive revisionary thinking. On my bus ride home, say, I could think through a particular issue so that I was ready to make the most of the limited time I had at the desk. One reason revision became so important to me, perhaps, is that I didn’t have time to write many new stories, but I did have the time to make those I had better. Of course, the fear now is that those liminal pockets of time—even standing in line waiting for something—are shrinking.

RJ: In the second chapter of the book, you note the importance of being able to see your own work through the eyes of a reader and point to workshops and editors as a helpful way of hearing from readers. However, not all feedback is useful. As a creative writing teacher, how do you prepare students to give and receive constructive and relevant feedback? Are there particular models or examples you find most effective?

PHD: Not all feedback is correct—and I empower students to reject feedback that doesn’t work for them, including my own (it’s inevitable and healthy that we shape our own aesthetic not always in agreement with but sometimes in opposition to others)—but even incorrect feedback can sometimes be useful. I encourage student-critics to make suggestions about how to fix problems they identify in each other’s work—a prescriptive approach, with the important caveat that the writer isn’t bound to accept any of our prescriptions—because even if those “fixes” aren’t right, chances are they might still shed light on the problem and can thus be useful.

I talk to students at some length at the start of any class about these approaches, noting that while we’re all familiar with the old saw that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the less well-known coda—that innovation is the sincerest form of criticism—is also worth bearing in mind. We’re all seeking to give and receive sincere criticism, after all, in which light a strictly nonprescriptive approach of the kind that says “here are some problems with your story . . . good luck with that” seems a bit ungenerous to me.

There’s lots more guidance I give to critics—leaning into the strengths of a story in workshop can be very productive, too, of course—and as noted above I also typically meet one-on-one with folks who’ve been workshopped a week later to discuss how to filter and triage feedback. The sheer volume of notes from a good workshop can be overwhelming, especially if we make the mistake of thinking we need to address everything in a single revision. So what I suggest are some strategies for making it easier to get started. A simple but powerful first step is to fix the easy stuff first—that’s good for morale but also more subtly helps us to repossess our work from the workshop. Another approach is to begin with the changes that most excite the writer, not necessarily the ones the workshop deems most urgent, which can feel like chores. That’s a way of making revision more pleasurable, but that sense of excitement is also often an intuition of where productive new discoveries may lie. More broadly, the very embrace of revision is a way of modulating the anxieties of any workshop “verdict.” Knowing we’ll revise implies an expectation of criticism, and revision is the most meaningful way to reply to any feedback, for the writer to have the last word.

RJ: In the book, you relate how your experience studying physics at university has helped you to approach revision as an experiment, the process of asking “what if?” and exploring the different potential paths for a story to see what works. This process can take time, and for some writers the pressure to produce and publish can hinder such explorations. How do you overcome this pressure, and what advice do you have for those trying to do the same?

PHD: Flaubert’s line “Talent is long patience” is my go-to here, especially because I’m lucky to work with so many talented young writers. It’s commonplace to suggest that youth is an enemy of patience, but of course the same is true of talent—which we often understand as an accelerant or shortcut. Flaubert is basically saying that patience itself is a talent, a gift. But yet writers—young and old (age can also be an enemy of patience)—feel a pressure to produce and publish, to finish. To resist that a little, to buy them some time, I might note the regrets several writers have acknowledged for publishing something too soon. With students in an MFA who are necessarily focused on their two or three years in the program and thinking about a first book, I also try and open up the time horizon a little, reminding them that we’re trying in part to equip them for a writing life that will hopefully extend ten, twenty, thirty years before them. For all writers, though, there’s a tendency to rush toward completion, simply to be released from the nagging doubts and uncertainty about a draft. We think publication will assuage those, take the vexed judgment of our own work out of our hands . . . which it may, temporarily. But I suspect that nagging feeling is an uncomfortable sense that we aren’t yet quite done with a story to our own satisfaction . . . which may be the most essential judge.

It’s commonplace to suggest that youth is an enemy of patience, but of course the same is true of talent.

RJ: One of the metaphors you use in discussing drafts is that they are living creatures—they breathe in, breathe out, expand, contract. By the same logic, drafts can age (sometimes well, sometimes not) and reveal how our thinking has changed along the way. When you look back on your early writings, do they feel like they were written by a younger or a different version of you? And how does that experience of looking back inform your writing today?

PHD: Those early works certainly feel like they were written by a different self, though that’s not to say I disown them or am embarrassed by them. They’re the stories I had to write then, and they’re (mostly!) done as well as I could at the time. All my books of fiction, at some point in their writing, felt as if they were the only or last book I’d ever write, which is to say I wasn’t sure I’d ever finish them—a desperate feeling, but one that means I put everything I had at the time into each of them. Looking back, that desperation still informs my writing, but maybe in slightly more comforting ways—when I hit rock bottom now, I recognize the place, know I’ve been there before, know I’ve climbed out previously. It’s also true that while I don’t disown the old work, new work can sometimes be in conversation with old, a kind of revision that sends our writing forward. The stories of my second collection, Equal Love, say, are about parents and children, a kind of anticipation or rehearsal, in part, of my feeling about being a parent before I was one. My latest novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, is also about parenthood but is now told from the perspective of fifteen-plus years of experience as a father. There’s a kind of revision that takes the form of revisiting.

RJ: The epilogue includes the only two footnotes in the book, one of which offers a brief but tantalizing look into the work of revising The Art of Revision. Can you tell us a bit more about that process? What did you learn? How did the process shape and reshape your own understanding of revision?

PHD: Ironically, of all my books, this is the one that feels the least “done,” in the sense that I’m always finding new examples and new ways to talk about revision that I wish I could jam back in there. One example that a grad student brought to mind recently is that famous equation (originating with Steve Allen) that Tragedy + Time = Comedy, which feels like a very nice, pithy instance of a certain kind of revision. More broadly, I’ve been thinking of our inevitable tendency to think of every draft but the last as a kind of failure, and more broadly that our fundamental resistance to revision has to do with this sense of failure, our reluctance to acknowledge, let alone embrace that. Surely, though, all the intervening drafts that lead up to the last can’t all be failures, or if they are they’re useful ones, each—to borrow Beckett’s idea—a better (or at least different!) failure than the last. The phrase I’ve adopted for this—from tech bros, of all people; too much Silicon Valley during lockdown!—is the idea that revision is “not a bug, but a feature” of our work. Those footnotes late in the book, that meta-address of revision, are I guess an acknowledgement that every text has been revised, a pulling back of the curtain . . . as such, it may be less ironic than appropriate that the book remains a work in progress.

RJ: In the book, you do in-depth studies of a few revision examples from women and BIPOC writers, such as Kirstin Valdez Quade and Jorge Luis Borges. What additional examples from women and BIPOC writers would you suggest for those studying revision?

PHD: In the book, I also touch on revisionary examples from Flannery O’Connor, Angela Carter, and Brit Bennett, but my favorite might be the revisions of Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch,” which are now available in the terrific journal Draft. Carmen recently visited a class of mine to talk about the revision, and it was a high point of the semester. Other wonderful examples, though ones I learned of a little too late to include, are Kiese Laymon’s recent reissues of his essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and his novel Long Division. The latter, especially, is a fascinating revision—down to its radical restructuring in tête-bêche (head-to-tail) form—appropriately enough, since it’s a book that in its time-travel narrative about race takes revision as its subject. Luckily, I did have the chance to interview Kiese about the revisions for the Center for Fiction last year.

RJ: What are you working on now?

PHD: I’m slowly and tentatively finding my way back to some fiction about—what else? and like everyone else!—the end of the world, though on an intimate scale. A different, darker kind of revision, I guess. Another journey toward doneness. Or at least that’s my current hypothesis!