How Meditation Can Help With Your Writing Revision

Revising your own work is a complex process that deserves a systematic approach. The very first step can be as simple as taking a breath.

There’s nothing most writers fear more than revising their own work. That’s why we’re so excited to have Katey Schultz, the former artistic director at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, joining us next week with her first Narratively Academy class, The Fine Art of Deep Revision. This intensive three-week workshop is designed to empower writers with concrete, actionable revision techniques they can apply to memoirs, essays, short stories or novels. Today, Katey’s offering some deep thoughts on one unexpected way she likes to get started on revising.

One thing I like to emphasize when I teach revision is that writing is a physical act.

If we want our stories and memoirs to speak to the universal, we must look outside the bounds of our own experience, even beyond the current limits of our imaginations, and start thinking outside the box.

One way to make that happen is to get up out of your chair. Go on a walk, a run, a bike ride. Pace the room. Talk to ourselves — Yes, of course writers talk to themselves! We must! — sing to ourselves; you name it. Physically, we can leave the spaces where we wrote our early drafts and move our bodies, working in new environments and with new movements in order to jump-start revision.

We can also inquire about the internal landscapes of our own minds. Explicitly understanding our creative processes by tracking how we decide and why we decide, is one of the most important, yet invisible, things we do. Something starts — a jolt through the body, an image in the mind’s eye, a sense memory triggered — and that initial impulse gradually takes hold, inviting us to turn what we’re experiencing into a narrative on the page. Sometimes it comes out quite literally — perhaps as freewriting or journaling or even speaking into a recorder about past experiences. Other times, it comes out in fiction that seems eons away from anything we’ve personally experienced. But in either case, it begins in the mind — or the heart-mind, perhaps — which brings me to another technique writers can experiment with when preparing to revise: meditation.

If we explore mindfulness or meditation, these skills are immediately transferable into our lives as creative thinkers. While I’m rarely thinking about “what I’m going to do about that problem in chapter eight” during my meditation sessions, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the skills I’ve developed by focusing on the breath (checking in with my body and mind through the space of my cells, my lungs, my movement, the room, the continent, the globe…) are the same skills that help when I’m trying to revise.

Revision is about looking close and then looking closer. It’s about that space between the in-breath and the out-breath, or the space between the end of one sentence and the start of another. These spaces are often overlooked, but if we look closely, mindfully, what do we find there? What stories are waiting to come out? How does what rises up speak more keenly to the human experience than our earlier drafts? What if we were to write into the page, rather than across or down the page?

Each of these techniques — movement, inquiry, and meditation — can help writers gain critical perspective on their own work and see new possibilities within a draft.

But what about when we’re ready to return to the page? We’ve allowed the manuscript to rest or even workshopped it; we’ve gone on a long walk and taken a break. We feel like we’re ready. We’ve tried to shake things up and open our minds. We want to get back in there, but… where to begin?

In my own work, I often start by taking a closer look at verbs. Even in a quiet story or literary realist prose, we still need plot, and verbs are the only part of speech that imply action. More often than not, my verbs will either fall flat or ignite my curiosity. If it’s the former, I treat the verb as an invitation to think more precisely about the subtext and main text I’m trying to evoke. If it’s the latter, I understand that I may be onto something, and I should reflect further on what this verb could be telling me about the direction in which a particular piece wants to go.

And that’s just one technique I use for line-level deep revision! There are boatloads more, including techniques for thematic revision and structural revision.

Just as we work with our minds and bodies, we need to work with the words and clues we’ve left ourselves on the page. This is why I also like to teach the practical, technical and playful techniques of deep revision alongside these more conceptual ones. When we use all of these tools together, we end up with the strongest version of the work we set out to create.

In The Fine Art of Deep Revision with Narratively Academy, I’ll be teaching three of the most essential craft tools for deep revision, providing writers with concrete tools for big-picture developmental edits, sentence-level revision, and studying the structural components of your prose.

I hope you’ll join me!

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Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which The Daily Beast praised as an “ambitious and fearless” collection, and Still Come Home, a novel. She has taught all over the country — at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, Fishtrap, 49 Alaska Writing Center, StoryStudio Chicago, and her own organization, Maximum Impact, among others.