Revision: The Art of Listening Closely

I want to begin by acknowledging a debt—to George Saunders, one of my favorite writers and teachers, who has profoundly reshaped the way I think about revision. He doesn’t just offer craft advice, he offers a way of being with the work. A practice of attention, humility, and presence. He helped me see that revision isn’t just about fixing what’s broken—it’s a deeper, more intuitive act. A way of tuning the instrument of the story until it begins to hum with its own music.

If you haven’t read his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, run—don’t walk—to get a copy. It’s one of the wisest, most generous books on writing I’ve ever encountered. Page by page, Saunders opens up the revision process with rare clarity—not just to show how great stories work, but to help you hear what your own story may be trying to become.

What follows in this post is rooted in that influence but filtered through my own process—what I’ve discovered through rewriting, listening, and living inside the slow unfolding of a story.

Saunders once said that revision is how we practice relationship between ourselves and the reader. That each change we make, line by line, isn’t just technical—it’s emotional. We’re not asking, “Is this clever?” or “Does this work?” We’re asking: Does this make the connection stronger? More honest? More alive?

It’s a simple idea with profound implications.

When I was younger, I thought revision was about cleaning up a mess. Fix the commas, trim the fat, clarify the phrasing. But I’ve come to see it as something entirely different: a chance to listen more closely. To follow the quiet energy of a story where it actually wants to go—not where I first imagined it might.

Because here’s the truth: most first drafts are full of too-easy meanings. They reach for closure before the character has earned it. They announce what they should discover. And that’s okay. That’s where we begin. But then revision asks us to pay attention—to slow down, interrogate, re-see.

Line by line.

Not with a blueprint, but with a tuning fork.

Let the Story Lead

If a scene has heat—follow it, even if it doesn’t fit your current plan. It may be guiding you to reconsider elements you once considered essential. . Saunders quotes poet Gerald Stern, who once said: “If you start out to write a poem about two dogs mating, and you write a poem about two dogs mating—you wrote a poem about two dogs mating.” (The original uses a more vivid term, but the point stands.)

In other words: if nothing has shifted, if your understanding hasn’t deepened, then the revision hasn’t gone far enough.

Revision, at its core, is about honoring surprise. It’s about saying yes to the unexpected turns your subconscious suggests. Your deepest instincts—the ones you don’t quite understand yet—may actually be wiser than your initial intention.

You’re not sculpting marble from a block. You’re living inside the story—rearranging furniture, knocking down walls, walking the space until it starts to reflect who you really are.

More Specific. More Honest. More You.

Saunders describes revision as moving a draft toward higher and higher levels of organization. But what he’s really talking about is honesty. Each pass gives you a chance to be more specific. More attuned. Less performative and more present.

And underneath all that lies respect: respect for the reader’s time, attention, and trust. Every cut, every rephrasing, every moment you choose to keep or toss—it’s all a way of saying: I want this to matter to you. I want you to feel what I felt when I wrote it.

It’s like living in a room for a year. Over time, your taste starts to show up in the details. The furniture shifts. The light changes. Eventually, the space starts to feel like yours.

That’s what revision does. It takes something that anyone might have written and slowly turns it into something only you could have made.

And maybe that’s why we read fiction in the first place—not just to be told a story, but to feel another soul nearby. To sense, through the rhythms and hesitations and turns of thought, that someone else is trying to get it right. Not perfectly, but authentically.

Let It Surprise You

Sometimes we don’t know what our story means until very late in the process. It may never show up as a pithy sentence. It might only appear through a feeling—a thread of complexity, a moment of presence.

That’s okay.

In fact, that’s ideal.

Because stories, like people, are more than what they mean. They live in how they unfold. In how they move. In the strange internal logic that reveals itself only when we’re patient enough to listen.

The best changes I’ve made in revision didn’t come from a craft book or a plan. They came from intuition. A sentence sounded better rearranged. A section lifted when moved two pages earlier. A new paragraph opened a window, and suddenly the whole piece could breathe.

Once, in the process of working on a story, I felt an entirely different layer begin to emerge. I’d been writing about a woman navigating the slow loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s, when from deep in the waters of revision, the old story of Beowulf rose to the surface. Not literally. Not even consciously at first. Just an atmosphere, a whisper, then a choice to let it in. The ancient tale became a subtextual framework that cast new shadows across the contemporary one.

It’s not something I would have thought to do. Certainly not something I would have planned. But with patience, and repeated passes through the draft, that deeper architecture began to announce itself. That’s what a successful revision does: it gives the subconscious room to speak. That deep river below the surface—the place some call the muse—moves beyond logic into something stranger, more alive.

Alice Munro has spoken about “the infinite amount of stuff beneath the stuff.” I think that’s exactly what revision helps us find. Not the surface moves—but the layered truth underneath. The nuance. The complexity. The ache.

We only get there by staying in the room. By listening. And by being willing to follow the strange and beautiful ideas that surface once we’ve lived with the work long enough for it to begin talking back.

The Deep Mind at Work

. Einstein had one of his great breakthroughs while taking a bath. Another while staring out a window. He wasn’t thinking in the traditional sense—he was making space for something deeper to rise.

When we give ourselves over to the line-by-line work—not rushing it, not trying to pin down meaning too early—we leave room for the deeper engine to grind into motion. And that’s when connections are forged, symbols emerge, and what seemed unrelated begins to shimmer with intent.

It’s not magic. But it feels like it.

The more time we spend inside the work, the more we trust that something wise and hidden is moving beneath the words, the more likely it is to speak.

So part of revision is simply making space. Returning to the page not with pressure, but with curiosity. Not to force meaning, but to invite it.

When Do You Know You're Finished?
Sometimes, you don’t. At least, not in the way you might finish a to-do list or a tax form. Stories don’t always click shut with finality. More often, they quiet down.

You know you’re finished when the changes you make start circling back. When the edits become more about tinkering than necessity. When the new lines you try don’t necessarily make the piece better.

Saunders says a story is done when it stops changing. That rings true. You’ve gone over it so many times, felt your way through so many small adjustments, that the whole thing starts to hum at a frequency you recognize. You’re no longer trying to push it forward, you’re listening, and it’s not asking for more.

At that point maybe you’ve done enough.
Maybe the story is ready to meet the world.

The Reward of Paying Attention

I revise differently now. It’s no longer simply something I do after a draft; it’s the way I become a better writer: more alert, more myself.

I revise to uncover what the story wants to be. I revise to pay attention.

At its core, revision is a promise to yourself. A way of saying: I’m going to stay with this. I’m going to listen harder. I’m going to become, on the page, someone more alive, more honest, more exact.

I don’t worry anymore if the first draft is good. It just needs to exist so I can revise it. The work gets better not because I had a brilliant idea to begin with, but because I kept showing up. I stayed long enough to turn the ordinary into something meaningful.

Every so often, in the middle of it, something clicks—a sharper rhythm, a deeper cut, a line I didn’t know I had in me. Those are the moments that make it worthwhile.

Because in the end, all revision is choosing. Line by line, you’re shaping the story to reflect what you love—what you notice, what you find beautiful, what you believe matters. You’re filling the work with your preferences, your sense of light and weight and timing.

That’s what readers connect with—not perfection, but presence.

The more choices you make, the more of you gets into the story.

So if you’re struggling through revision, let this be your reminder:

You’re not fixing a broken thing.
You’re listening more closely.
You’re making the story more yours.

And that, in itself, is the work.