The Art of Revision: The Last Word

by Peter Ho Davies

The fifteenth volume in the Art of series takes an expansive view of revision―on the page and in life

In The Art of The Last Wor d, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject. He begins by addressing the invisibility of revision―even though it’s an essential part of the writing process, readers typically only see a final draft, leaving the practice shrouded in mystery. To combat this, Davies pulls examples from his novels The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes , as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carmen Machado, and Raymond Carver, shedding light on this slippery subject.

Davies also looks beyond literature to work that has been adapted or rewritten, such as books made into films, stories rewritten by another author, and the practice of retconning in comics and film. In an affecting frame story, Davies recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision―that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving, one that asks writers to reflect upon themselves and their writing.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Crafts, Art

172 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2021

About the author

Peter Ho Davies is a contemporary British writer of Welsh and Chinese descent. He was born and raised in Coventry. Davies studied physics at Manchester University then English at Cambridge University.

In 1992 he moved to the United States as a professor of creative writing. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He has published two collections of short fiction, The Ugliest House in the World (1998) and Equal Love (2000). His first novel, The Welsh Girl came out in 2007.

Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I pick up "how-to" books on writing and find them too academic. Borderline boring. Filled with Macy's Day Parade-sized excerpt balloons. I still feel one of the best I've read is, ironically enough, Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Ironic because I don't think he's much of a writer. At least not the kind people will be reading in 2122.

This book surprised me because, well, I expected a lot of practical stuff and didn't get much. It wants to be that book, I think, but Davies is more intent on an artistic re-imagining of the word "revision" and what it means. For instance, did you know that the exact same words can be a "revision" if they are read in different times under a different context? I love heady games like that.

A bit of memoir and self-promotion (he occasionally uses his own work as an example) goes into this, but all in all, I came away thinking, "Shoot. This is not just a book for writers. It's as much a book for readers!"

I liked it, I just don't think it is what it purports to be. But I reserve the right to revise my thoughts. That's for you, Mr. Davies. That's for you!

[Clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wasn't quite what I was expecting, probably because I'm in the process of "revising" a draft of a novel into something that I hope will be publishable. But the book is more about choices writers make in creating whole new versions of a work, or that OTHER artists make when adapting the work. That's a whole different kind of revision, and while it's really interesting, it's maybe not as useful to writers who are revising their own work as they might wish. Wonderfully written, though, as you'd expect from Davies.

[archive ☄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

@writers please do yourself a favor and read this,,!! revision is one of my least favorite things Ever but this book made me want to finish writing my novel so i could revise it..... what kind of peter ho davies sorcery,

[Emily Mirengoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful, personal, and inspiring. If you are a writer of fiction, this should not be missed. If you think a craft book can't make you cry, well, you haven't read this book yet.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the gem-like Art of series about writing, of which I've collected all published so far. Also for readers who are non-writers, because they are terrific.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really lovely. I would recommend reading this BEFOFE the art of recklessness tho

[AJ Nolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Going to use with my Advanced Fiction Workshop students to foreground revision as creative and essential to writing.

[Kristin Boldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary book that belongs on the permanent writer shelf for me. Davies' lovely prose, emotional wisdom, and excellent writing examples make for a superb craft guide, while the story he spins from beginning to end of an event with his father from his youth, is a lovely miniature memoir. All the added examples from geek culture (Battlestar Galactica!) as revision are just the sprinkles on top.

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

An expertly executed craft book that rebukes clichés and intuitively explicates the often invisible processes of revision. There's a lot to love about Davies' vision of a living method of revision—expanding the work conceptually through subsequent drafts as opposed to refining it to a singular sharp point.

He cites common and uncommon examples of revision, casting aside presuppositions about 'craft' and encouraging the reader to draw from a multilayered approach of both material substance and expanding cultural understanding. Perhaps most impressively, he threads a personal narrative of revision throughout the book, allowing the reader to experience the various relearning and retelling of a story, guiding one to a literal emotional catharsis.

A truly welcome and unexpected feat. It's something I've never seen pulled off so well in a book that's ostensibly about practical writing advice.

[Kim Horner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the best book on writing I've ever read, and I have read a bookcase full. Make sure you're at the right point in your practice, though, that you can benefit from Ho Davies' advice and illustrations. This will take up permanent residence on my TBRR shelf.

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this series from Graywolf and Davies packs a masterclass in revision in under 200 pages. Some really lovely thoughts and reflections using sections from Carver and other writers, while slipping in and out of memoir and essay-adjacent writing.

[Kylen Williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a significant amount of useful advice for revising. Why again do I keep reading books about writing? I’ve yet to meet one that I think is good.

Mostly just used it as an excuse to not write.

[Maddy Dolby · Rating 3 out of 5]

lowkey gonna bit repetitive but was defs helpful

[Alia]

the irony of a book about revision needing revision

[Walter Polashenski · Rating 5 out of 5]

That was a really inspiring. I’ll go revise. Again.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Ho Davies begins “The Art of Revision: The Last Word” with the sort of scene that makes you feel, almost guiltily, how little the word craft can hold. A boy runs. Men chase. The street becomes a corridor of witnesses, each person granted that terrible allotment of time in which to decide whether to move. The setting is Coventry in the late 1970s, but the coordinates matter less than the pressure in the moment: what you do, what you do not do, and what a story does with both. Davies narrates the event as memoir, then returns with a fictional version of it, altering names, angles, consequences. The revision does not sanitize the memory; it interrogates it, asking what a story can offer that testimony cannot.

The opening is doing more than setting a tone. It is staging an argument: that revision is not merely a method for making prose prettier, but a means of returning to experience, of re-seeing what you once survived too quickly to understand. The book’s “provincial life,” borrowed from “Middlemarch,” names the smallness of a first account, the way early versions flatten the world to what the teller can bear. Revision becomes, here, a second chance at attention, not at innocence.

Many books about writing approach revision the way home improvement shows approach kitchens: the problem is cosmetic, the solution is technique, the reveal arrives in thirty minutes. Swap out the cabinets, sand down the sentences, add an island of sensory detail. Davies is wary of the promise. Revision, he argues, is not the “after” to drafting’s “before.” It is the center of the art, the stage at which a piece learns what it is trying to be.

His governing metaphor arrives in the first chapter: revision as a black box. Like the flight recorder, it stores the evidence of what happened in the air, but it is seldom opened for public inspection. Readers encounter the landing, not the turbulence. Students encounter a peer’s story as if it were a single object rather than an accretion of hesitations and reversals. Davies argues that this secrecy breeds shame and distorts what we think talent looks like.

As a novelist and teacher, he is impatient with advice that stays on the surface. He is less interested in familiar injunctions – vary sentence openings, cut the adverbs – than in the sensations that make writers resist revision in the first place. The most corrosive sensation, he suggests, is the sense of failure. If revision is “fixing,” then needing to revise becomes an admission that you did not write it right. If revision is discovery, the admission changes: you did not yet know what you were writing until you revised it. The shift is subtle but profound. It turns revision from punishment into inquiry.

There is, threaded through the book, a quiet critique of the cult of first drafts. Davies knows the myth: the genius who pours out perfection, the sentence “fully sprung,” the romantic idea that the cleanest writing is the writing least touched by labor. He also knows why writers cling to it. First drafts arrive with the perfume of innocence. They are fast enough to outrun self-censorship. They let us believe, briefly, that we are conduits rather than workers. Revision, by contrast, looks like toil, like dishes, like returning your hands to the same stubborn problem. Davies’s insistence is gentle but unyielding: the work is not diminished by labor; it is made by it.

To make his case, Davies looks outward. “Other Hands, Other Eyes” widens the definition of revision to include the cultural afterlife of stories: novelizations of films, film adaptations of novels, remakes, response narratives, retroactive continuity. He recalls reading science-fiction novelizations as a child and noticing that the book did not precisely match the movie. The discrepancies, whether accidental or deliberate, show stories as living structures, reshaped by medium, audience, and time.

From there, Davies turns to more formal acts of revision-by-another-name. Response novels like “Wide Sargasso Sea,” “The Hours,” and “The Penelopiad” do not simply pay tribute to “Jane Eyre,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” or “The Odyssey.” They argue with them. They reopen the distribution of sympathy. They adjust the light. Such works expose revision as a mode of critique, and critique as a mode of creation. The pleasure in this chapter is the recognition that revision is not an internal penance but a human habit. We cannot resist retelling, because retelling is one of the ways we test meaning.

The book’s most sustained demonstration of this idea is a case study involving Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” and Ron Hansen’s story of the same name, which borrows Hemingway’s dialogue and then follows the killers out of the diner, shifting the moral center of gravity as it goes. Davies is good at showing how a shift that seems merely formal can be ethically charged. A scene you once read as existential chill begins to look like an experiment with missing variables. Small choices in point of view, in what the narrative grants and withholds, change the temperature of what we think we are watching.

This emphasis on attention helps explain why “The Art of Revision: The Last Word” feels, for all its practicality, like a book about perception. Davies returns to the question of how we misread our own drafts. The word processor has its own sleight of hand: typed text looks finished too early, and earlier versions vanish behind the cursor. When the history is invisible, revision can feel like failure rather than process.

“Suck It and See,” borrowed from British idiom, becomes Davies’s manifesto for experiment. Revision is not a tribunal where the draft is prosecuted. It is a laboratory where hypotheses are tested, disproved, and sometimes confirmed. Many writers revise as if each change were irreversible, as if the draft were a single fragile vase that might shatter. Davies urges the opposite: make the copy, attempt the radical cut, try the alternate beginning, and give yourself permission to risk.

What makes this advice feel earned is that Davies does not present risk as a personality trait. He presents it as a procedure. Push farther than feels tasteful. Let the draft become temporarily worse, if worse is the route to truer. The point is not to be reckless for its own sake, but to escape timid revision, the sort of revision that changes nothing essential while giving the writer the comfort of having “worked.” A cautious writer can satisfy every small note and still avoid the large question: what is this piece actually about, and what would it look like if it were not afraid of its own answer?

Then comes “Sore Thumbs,” which seems almost comic until you recognize the truth it smuggles in: revision hurts. Not in the melodramatic sense – though writers are good at melodrama – but in the way any sustained attention hurts. Drafting rides momentum. Revising replaces momentum with scrutiny, and scrutiny is tiring because it is honest. It asks you to look again at choices you made while intoxicated by forward motion. It asks you to confront the places you bluffed, the places you wrote around the thing you did not yet know how to say. Davies’s most generous gift may be his refusal to treat that pain as a pathology. It is simply what attention feels like when you are no longer skimming your own work.

He is alert, too, to the ways writers misread resistance. Some interpret discomfort as proof they are untalented. Some interpret it as a sign they should start something new. The culture of productivity encourages this flight: new project, fresh energy, a clean file. Davies does not condemn newness, but he asks the writer to notice what avoidance looks like in revision’s clothing. You can revise forever at the level of tinkering and still never confront the real problem, the one that requires you to reimagine the piece’s basic contract with the reader. Sometimes the bravest revision is not an improvement but a conversion.

The chapter called “Darlings” takes up the most brutal cliché in the workshop lexicon and makes it less brutal. Davies is skeptical of the macho version of the maxim, the one that treats cutting as a moral triumph. A “darling,” in his account, is not merely a pretty sentence. It is any element you cling to for reasons that do not serve the work’s coherence: a scene that exists to display research, a metaphor you cannot part with, a character who dazzles but dilutes. The danger is not love but indiscriminate love, the inability to distinguish between what pleases you and what the piece needs.

What Davies offers instead is a gentler rigor. Save the cut material. Move it to a file with a name that acknowledges its charm without granting it authority. Recognize that what you cut is not necessarily wasted – it may simply belong elsewhere. This is revision as relocation rather than execution. It is a practical tip, but it is also a psychological one. Writers cling because cutting feels like waste, and waste feels like shame. Davies’s archive trick converts shame into possibility. You are not killing your darlings so much as admitting they deserve a different home.

The most anxious question arrives in “Dun, Dun … Done”: how do you know when the work is finished? Davies’s answer refuses melodrama. A piece is never finished in any absolute sense. Any text could be revised again, just as any memory could be retold. But finishing is not metaphysics; it is an agreement between writer and work. There is a point of diminishing returns where changes become marginal, where each adjustment introduces a new problem, where revision begins to circle itself. At that point, continuing is not devotion but delay.

Here the book’s tone becomes quietly bracing. Davies does not romanticize the writer as a monk polishing a sentence forever. He suggests that endless revision can become a kind of avoidance: avoidance of risk, avoidance of the reader, avoidance of being judged. A finished piece, imperfect as it must be, is a piece that can be shared. It can enter the world, where it will be revised by other hands anyway – by readers, by time, by the next writer’s response. The writer’s job is not to achieve a flawless object. It is to make a work coherent enough to withstand the world’s inevitable revisions, and to accept that the world will revise it regardless of your wishes.

The epilogue, “Provincial Life Redux,” returns to the Coventry scene and makes explicit what has been accumulating all along: revision is an ethical practice. The shift from memoir to fiction is not only a shift in genre; it is a shift in responsibility. Who becomes the center? Who gets agency? What is clarified, and what is softened? Davies does not offer easy absolution. If anything, he shows how revision can sharpen moral complexity rather than resolve it. You can revise the story, but you cannot revise away the fact that telling is also choosing.

This is the book’s distinctive contribution. Plenty of writing guides teach you how to improve a paragraph. Few insist, with such quiet insistence, that improvement is inseparable from perception and perception is inseparable from ethics. Davies’s style – essayistic, patient, slightly wry – is part of the argument. He is not selling certainty. He is modeling a temperament: the willingness to return, to reconsider, to entertain the possibility that your first account of your own work is incomplete. The book teaches revision partly by behaving like revision: revisiting an idea, turning it, looking at what it reveals from a new angle.

The modest length of “The Art of Revision: The Last Word” is itself a kind of provocation. Davies does not overwhelm the reader with systems. He offers a handful of concepts and returns to them from multiple angles, trusting the reader to do the rest. For some, this will feel like a missing appendix. There are moments when you might wish for more extended demonstrations, more pages of drafts laid side by side, more granular walk-throughs of a scene evolving. Davies prefers to keep the focus on principles rather than recipes, and that choice is both the book’s elegance and its gamble.

The examples, too, tilt toward the literary. Davies’s touchstones – Hemingway, Eliot, Woolf, the short story as a moral pressure cooker – are not exclusions so much as coordinates. Writers working in genres with stricter conventions, or in collaborative forms where speed and committee shape revision, may find themselves mentally annotating his points: yes, but deadlines; yes, but series bibles; yes, but readers who punish deviation. Yet the book’s best insights are portable precisely because they are not tied to a single method. He is not prescribing a workflow so much as proposing a way of seeing.

What lingers after reading “The Art of Revision: The Last Word” is not a list of steps but a shift in posture. Revision appears less like the dreary chore that follows the “real” writing and more like the place where the real writing finally begins. Davies does not promise that revision will become pleasant. He does, however, offer a consoling reframe: difficulty is not proof you are failing; it is often proof you are paying attention. The sore thumbs are not an indictment. They are evidence of contact.

In a culture that fetishizes speed – daily word counts, productivity hacks, the myth of the perfect first pass – Davies’s book feels quietly countercultural. It argues for slowness not as virtue-signaling but as necessity. It argues for the humility of returning. It argues, finally, for the courage to let go: to cut what you love when love is not enough, to stop when the work no longer changes in meaningful ways, to release the draft into the world where it will be revised again by readers and time.

There are limits, and they are the limits of temperament as much as of content. Readers craving a procedural manual may find Davies too essayistic, too willing to circle an idea rather than pin it to a checklist. His examples lean toward literary fiction, and his faith in ambiguity assumes a reader who wants to linger. But the reward for that patience is a rare kind of permission: not permission to be sloppy, but permission to take the time the work actually requires.

If the book occasionally leaves you wishing for more procedural heft, that wish is itself a lesson. Davies is not offering a shortcut; he is asking you to live inside the work. His book is a companion for the writer who has begun to suspect that revision is less a technique than a relationship – with language, with memory, with the stubborn fact that telling a story is always also choosing what to leave out. For that companionship, and for the clarity with which it dignifies the hardest part of writing, I would place “The Art of Revision: The Last Word” at 85 out of 100.

[Rachel León · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Graywolf's The Art Of series and I was excited to see one on revision, which is arguably the most important aspect of writing, yet one that's rarely taught. Written by Peter Ho Davies, this book offers personal anecdotes, musings, and revision examples from writers like James Joyce and Frank O'Connor, managing to be both enjoyable and informative. Highly recommend!

(Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.)

[Matt Briggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This an insightful book length essay that addresses the conflicting advice various writers have given about revision. This is a bit funny, since it is seems a common trope in books about revision that the author most point out how few books there are about revision. Not only are there a lot of books about revision, most of the practical books about how to write spend a lot of time on finding feedback and revision. For example, the bulk of Peter Elbow's book Writing Without Teachers is about the practice of feedback to an existing piece of writing, and then using it in the feedback loop of compose, read, revise. This book looks at the reality behind the idea of writer's creating good first drafts by talking about the reality behind Kerouac's On the Road scroll manuscript that he typed in a Benzedrine fueled, three-week writing session. By wandering through the writing process, where stories might come from, and how they are retold from conception to page from page to page, published and sometimes revised and looking at some famous writer/editor/revision stories, Davies lays out a lot of the conflicts and competing methods that writers have used for revision.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ho Davies critical essay got me excited to revise my work, and for that reason alone it gets five stars! I really enjoyed his novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself and wanted to learn more about his process. Well worth it!

[Alissa Hattman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Art of Revision is a wonderful resource for all writers. Peter Ho Davies’s generous, holistic approach to the concept of revision is thoughtfully constructed. Afterward, I not only had new practical ideas for revising, but I had a better sense of my own philosophy for revision as well.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a revision book that is less focused on the craft elements and more focused on the meaning of the practice in a philosophical sense. Some tidbits do have utility to making changes to a project, and otherwise it’s an interesting exercise on the meaning of literature.

And yes, this guide does skew literary, even though has enough geek cred to talk some about science fiction (usually in television form.) Career wise, Peter Ho Davies is a novelist and short story writer with accolades from PEN/Malamud and elsewhere, He teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. But once upon a time he was a physics student at Manchester University in the UK, a transition he might refer to as revision.

Revision, for him, starts as a writer getting closer to the core messages that move them to write in the first place. Ho Davies routinely references an event from his past here, where his father fought off some xenophobic bullies in the 1970s. He tries to write about it in his novel, THE WELSH GIRL in a scene moved to Nazi Germany. But it doesn’t offer full catharsis. His feelings about the event change with time. “In the closing weeks of 2016 I found myself reaching back to that story about my father—a white working class man coming to the aid of a person of color,” Ho Davies said, now thinking of that as a bastion of hope during a time when Trumpian politics were on the rise. Whereas the scene in THE WELSH GIRL focuses more on Ho Davies’s own sense of cowardice, transferred onto his characters.

He also looks to other writers for their revision processes. Classic literary short story writers have a tendency to write, re-write and re-sell the same stories—sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. This is less about using developmental editing to fix bad writing, and doesn’t mention at all any publishing standards about the necessary plot and character beats to sell a book. Indeed, Ho Davies is writing an installment in the Gray Wolf “Art Of” series, which takes a more cerebral approach to the writing life.

Still, I’d probably arch my eyebrow a little bit when he talks about revision as re-tellings: eg, THE WIDE, SARGASSO SEA being a retelling of JANE EYRE. Maybe it’s a societal revision to focus on another aspect of the story, but it wasn’t the author, Charlotte Bronte’s, journey. An interesting sociological point, to be sure, but aren’t we getting off track here? “Revision” means something different for the individual writer.

There are a couple of times in the books where Ho Davies approaches something in the realm of craft, and I commend him for challenging the status quo. Take, for example, his argument against the popular revision phrase, “kill your darlings.” He’d rather “save your darlings,” and evokes them as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “We hope and assume [each “darling” piece] will find its rightful place in some other part of the puzzle.” As a writing instructor, he’s even gotten to see some re-purposed pieces from his students—eg, he taught Brit Bennett, whose character Reese from THE VANISHING HALF first appeared elsewhere in one of his workshops. Cool!

Even more pertinent to me and my current journey with my fantasy manuscript, he talks about the metaphor of writers getting “lost” along the way. Ho Davies calls on his science background to help with this one. :P

“Each story begins with a hypothetical: what if?” Ho Davies posits. “Fiction may be indeed understood as a kind of thought experiment. What is a lie in search of the truth after all—Picasso’s definition of art—if not some form of provisional knowledge?” As we go through the experiment, we test our hypothesis—on our own and then with critique partners—about what belongs in the story and, more broadly, what the story is about. With regards to getting overwhelmed by all of the necessary revisions, Ho Davies suggests a specific issues-based approach to each new draft.

So, it’s a small book that jumps around a lot with regards to the craft of revision to the existential meaning of it in the evolving literary canon. Definitely worth picking up if you have an appreciation for literary fiction. Occasionally, scifi fans get thrown a bone, too. :P (One of Ho Davies’s own short stories was inspired by the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” for example.)

“Until Ho Davis’s book, I believed revision was a process that took place afterwards,” Noelle Q De Jesus wrote in a review in Cha Voices. “Ultimately, [he] makes one thing clear—the act of writing is revision. It is the constant push and pull on the page, the repeated re-visioning--that is, seeing again. Writing is revising.”

By that metric, my current process with my fantasy manuscript isn’t, in fact, an overwhelming sloth, but is instead the road to enlightenment. :D Huzzah.

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been making my way through a few writing craft guides and so far, this is my favorite. If you're looking for a how-to or a handy outline to follow, this won't meet the mark (though Davies does have some practical ideas for strategizing your next revision); it's more of a philosophical exploration of how revision manifests subtly all around us, an all-around debunking of the "first-is-best" mindset that leads authors to fear revision or approach it as a list of checkboxes that need to be grudgingly filled so we can get on to the reward of being read and published. It's a slim book, but packed full of insights. Some of my favorite points:

1) Revision is as much a process of reading as of writing—learning how to deeply read our own work. It requires patience and humility and the understanding that we did *not* understand as much as we thought we did when we set out.

2) Throwing everything out and starting again is just as much a way of avoiding revision as only tweaking your grammar. (Ouch, Peter, why you gotta call me out like that?)

3) Getting feedback from readers is a way of accelerating the necessary wait time between drafts, i.e. it helps you achieve objectivity faster.

4) Approach successive drafts as opportunities to test hypotheses. Just as a scientific experiment hasn't failed if it doesn't prove the hypothesis, so a revision hasn't been a wasteful effort if your "what if?" doesn't lead where you thought it would.

5) Contrary to the editorial ethos that would characterize revision principally as an act of tidying and cutting ("murder your darlings"), many drafts need to expand before they contract.

6) Speaking of murder your darlings: A lot of the metaphors for revision are unabashedly masculine, borrowing language from butchery or carpentry (or murder...) Davies cites Nick Hornby, whose brief explanation for this pattern is both insightful and hilarious:

"People are desperate to make [writing] sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do...The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging."

Look at me over here, breaking my back on my novel-farm!

Davies offers up the metaphor of a revision as a story "inhaling and exhaling" as one alternative.

7) Raymond Carver probably wrote "A Small Good Thing" BEFORE "The Bath"; the latter is a revision of the former. WHAT?! 🤯 I've been teaching these for years and never knew.

8) The Great Gatsby was reportedly once titled "Hurrah for the Red, White, and Blue," which is one of the worst titles I've ever heard. Davies' point—revise your titles!—is well-taken.

9) "Every writer is a writer because they were bored."

10) You know a revision is done when you finally understand your intent for writing the story in the first place.

That's just a sampling. Writers of fiction will get a lot out of this smart, fun little book!

[Peter A · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful book into the “art” of revision, whether short story or novel. In the early portion of the book, the author argues for revision, discussing hesitancy to do so, giving several examples to show revision is common, and motivating revision to explore the story.

The author argues, uniquely, from what I have read, from the perspective of a scientist—though a reader should not be put off by that statement. Writing a story is like testing a hypothesis to learn what is happening. Revising is also writing, to follow new leads, to expand, or to take down scaffolding that might have motivated the story, which it no longer needs.

In his penultimate chapter, the author discusses how a writer knows she is done. For the author, it is the understanding of what the story is about, which might differ from where the exploration start.

My inadequate summary of this book for a writer is: Writing is about learning the story, gaining some knowledge of characters and what happens. Revising is understanding the story.

The author draws upon works of his and others to show the ubiquity of revision, and how changes in point of view, detail,… can change the story. In one example, of Raymond Carver’s work being edited by Gordon Lish, known for his conciseness. Carver later published another version of the story, more elaborate. In an analysis by Steven King, comparing the two versions, the length added both explanations of other characters’ action, but more importantly, it added “heart.”

The author begins with a personal story of his father stepping in to protect a Sikh from some skinheads, when the author was a boy who just stood and watched what happened. After forty years of living with that memory, the author finally understands what he saw. In this section, the author wrote with heart.

FB. An extremely worthwhile book to read by writers, aspiring writers, and readers, on the meaning, rationale, and effect of revision. Writing is about learning the story… revising, also writing, is understanding the story, each draft allowing the writer to learn more and understand better.

[Patricia King · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Art of" series from Graywolf Press is such a gift to fiction writers. I imagine it is for poets, too -- the series is divided between a focus on fiction and a focus poetry writing -- but as a fiction writer, I can say that every book in this series that I've read has been wonderful: The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter; The Art of Perspective by Christopher Castellani, and The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber. The latest edition to the series, Peter Ho's The Art of Revision, is no exception.

This is a deep dive into what it means to revise one's fiction writing -- a book which is part theoretical, part personal reflection, and part exploration of some examples of serious revision in literary history. (Yes, Raymond Carver's revisions of his stories under Gordon Lish's editorial influence are one such example, but Ho examines some lesser-known cases, too.)

Those readers looking to add a few more tools to the writer's toolkit, so to speak, may end up somewhat disappointed: this is not exactly a how-to book. Rather, it's a reaffirmation of truths most serious writers know from experience, but which I for one appreciated hearing again, with all of the nuance and depth Ho brings to this particular discussion: that the act of revision takes courage and patience; that it is an ongoing series of experiments; that it is what we do to arrive at a true understanding of what our work is "about" and what our work's intentions are: aspects we know only dimly or partially when we begin to write a piece.

[Hobart Mariner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Craft essay specifically focused on drafting and revision. Not a lot of unique advice but charmingly framed with reference to the author's own life history, particularly an episode from his boyhood when his father, a Welsh engineer, saved a Sikh teenager from being hatecrimed by skinheads.

Mostly he takes the purpose of his essay to be overcoming the resistance people have towards the revision process, so it's a lot of mindset stuff. Where our fearful and simplistic approach to revision comes from, insecurity, etc. Relatively few practical tips, but that's okay --- those are available elsewhere. The rough draft is just a hunch, rather than a divine inspiration; it is just one in a series of hypotheses/framings of the story which we continually update as our understanding of the story, and its understanding of itself, progress. One of the few new (to me) ideas he suggests is using the title of the work as a sort of movable creative scaffolding. Lots of comparisons with scientific hypotheses and experimentation, including an iffy comparison with the uncertainty principle (all of which ymmv).

Good specific case studies for a variety of authors: O'Connor (Flannery and Frank), Carver and Lish, Joyce, Ron Hansen, Wells Tower, Ben Lerner (eh), Isaac Babel. None of these were groundbreaking but it was cool to see all these anecdotes in one place. Interesting, brief touch on Bloom's revisionary ratios concept.

Quick, enjoyable read. Jarring use of a quote from the Showtime series "Billions" as epigraph.

[Anne Earney · Rating 4 out of 5]

More about the philosophy of revision than the technical aspects, but overall a very enjoyable read. I like that revision is approached here as an ongoing process. He sees the draft as a living thing that inhales and exhales as it's added to or subtracted from, and even sees the ideas that one's work addresses as something that might be ongoing across projects, that will be revised or presented in different ways over the years. This book left with the feeling that you can't really do revision wrong, as you can always head back toward the previous draft if the new draft doesn't work out.

I've been reading more about revision lately and Davies is not alone in lamenting that it's difficult to find earlier drafts of published works, and this got me thinking about visual art, which we generally see without awareness of earlier versions unless the artist's sketches survived, in which case they're sometimes displayed in galleries right next to the final work. I recently visited the Picasso museum in Barcelona and there were long galleries of paintings of the same subject, slightly different each time, and it was fascinating to see the differences between each one and think about what might have been going through his mind. So I guess I do like to see the earlier versions of art, and I know I get to see those more often than I get to read early drafts. Of course, reading an early draft would take a lot more time than looking at a sketch, so I'm not sure how into I'd be even if it was possible.

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Art of Revision, by Peter Ho Davies is a excellent guide providing an overview of revising. With eight chapters he covers the journey of revision in a way that asks essential questions.

In the prologue, he poses the question: How is the resultant whole greater than the sum of its altered parts? In his chapter Blackbox (2nd) he introduces that revision is a journey of a story and the writers relationship to that story. We revise to know more about what we write till we have written what we know.

In the chapter Suck It and See (4th) the middle is also the muddle. He brings up writing a treatment, defining in 4 to 6 lines what the story is, to strip it of specificity (setting, period, character, etc), as advised by Frank O'Connor.

In the chapter Dun, Dun...Done (7th) he reminds us boredom is the soil for daydreaming and imagination. And, “Doneness, in some fundamental sense, returns a story to its writer, even if much of the work of revision is to see our work through the eyes of the reader. This is why I wrote this. This is what it means to me. This is why I value it. Knowing that is a powerful justification of the writing act, of the process and the end product, so powerful to be an end in itself, a goal in itself. Doneness means we’re done with the story, and the story is done with us…which means that what follows—publication, critical reception, sales, and so on—aren’t the end goal.”

[Al Kratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the art of writing series. A lot of the things I love about it were almost impossible for Davies to include with this topic. The strength of the others is a deep dive into specific examples of the topic. The result is a meditation on reading as much as writing. Davies has to stretch to “show” the art of revision. He’s limited to examples of his own work or the rare examples of authors publishing multiple versions of their stories or public discussions of drafts like carver and Gish. He stretches with tv and movie examples. You can see this limitation just by looking at the reading list at the end of the book and how limited it is. Somehow he missed Alice Munro all together, one of the most notorious writers with revision copy from journal to collection. Another move Davies makes here is to focus on the case of Revision is a good thing. This borders on a straw man argument or at least it does for me, and I would guess most folks who buy a book on the art of revision already agree with its merits. That all being said I still enjoyed this book and the thoughts within it. The middle chapters hit the sweet spot and had a momentum the overall collection could not, possibly because of the challenging scope.

[Meg Mahoney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cspturing words as a way to recall:

"I'd go so far as to say all writing is revision, and all writers are revisers at heart. Hemingway approaches this in his famous axiom, echoed by many others, that "the only kind of writing is rewriting..." p.55

"And if revision is re-vision, re-seeing, we might understand it specifically as a shift from seeing our work through the eyes of its writer to seeing out work through the eyes of a reader. The first of those people - the writer - thinks he or she knows what they're doing, what they intend; the second, the reader, is trying to figure it out. The first mindset serves the first draft, the second serves revision."
p. 63

"Every story has a beginning, a muddle, and an end. Small wonder then that revision - the middle of the writing process; the journey from first to final draft - can feel like such a muddle at times, our own dark woods." p. 67

[Kenneth Chanko · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite simply the best book I’ve ever read on the process of revision, but I feel it can also offer help for those embarking on — or for those who are in the midst of — a first draft, whether it’s a short story, novel, or memoir. As for me, being toward the end of a fourth or fifth draft (my “final” draft? … well, maybe…) of a 300-ish-page novel that I’ve been working on for several years now, this book has served to spur me on and refine my approach. Peter Ho Davies, in under 200 pages, interweaves practical tips and specific examples from published work (Carver, et al.) to provide insights on this often misunderstood process, along with his personal experiences with revision, all of which make for a wise, inspiring read.