Revision as Devotion

 I've been thinking a lot about revision as an art form or a devotion/ a way of tending.

I used to believe that good work arrived fully formed, clear and articulated from the start. I thought the first draft was actually the only draft, and the podcast episode, the personal essay, the voice note, all of it should emerge polished on the first try.

I now see how much that belief actually kept me from developing a creative practice.

When I started my public creative practice, my podcast called, ‘I'm Glad You're Here,’ I was full of energy. All I wanted to do was hit record, have a great conversation and share the episode. And the last thing I wanted to think about was editing. Yes, editing felt tedious, but underneath that was a deeper belief that if my work even needed editing, if it wasn't already perfectly coherent or compelling, then it must be bad. I feared that if I listened back too closely, I would reject the work before anyone else ever encountered it. So I decided that outsourcing, hiring someone to do the audio editing, was the exact help I needed to actually get my work out in the world. And that was true. It actually really let me move before perfectionism shut me down entirely, and I am very grateful for that.

But over time, I realized I was outsourcing the final production and I wasn't giving myself the opportunity to revise at any other stage, so I was actually avoiding my own relationship to revision. What had initially sustained the podcast, the momentum of releasing an episode and hiring out the need to edit, no longer worked for me. So, I started searching for this new source of motivation, and I found myself confronting what I had been avoiding all along; that editing or revision might actually be the key to my success.

What I've been learning is that editing is not about tearing yourself apart. It's not about punishment or failure. It's really about the process through which a work becomes more fully itself, and that takes devotion.

I didn't want to script because I didn't want to sound mechanical. I figured that spontaneity gave my voice authenticity. I played a lot of these games with myself. I did all I could do to avoid editing and this iterative process because I assumed that was failure.

But podcasting, like writing, is a form. It takes shape because of the process of revision, and it actually depends on this, and I wasn't giving myself the gift or the opportunity of revision.

I say revision is a devotional practice because I really believe it asks us to return to our work and to be able to reimagine it, to reshape it, or rework it with our ever-evolving selves. It asks us to stay in a relationship and not just walk away or abandon it after the first attempt to make it work.

I now see the drafts, or the stages of editing, as this interdependent process. Every stage of a draft has its own value and maybe, what we call a “final draft” is often just the version we decide to share. I trust that I will revise how I speak in the future, I may reconsider the language, the framing, the shape of the thought itself, or even the entire story, and that no longer feels like instability.

I love that revision asks for a willingness to stay with the work long enough for it to actually change you and for you to change it.