Revising in Public
Embrace the process instead of suffering for perfection
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
In the 1970s, having a typewriter at home was a little bit unusual. Most of my friends didn’t have easy access to one, nor did they care (though admittedly, my sample size was small). My mother, on the other hand, not only had a typewriter, but also started training me on touch typing almost as soon as I learned to read.
Surprisingly, I was entirely on board with that plan. I wanted to learn how to type!
Why would a seven year old be excited about typing? Because this early exposure to “text technology” shaped my perspective on writing and rewriting.
In my mind, writing as an activity was done on a typewriter. Hand scribbling in notebooks or diaries did not count. For a story to be a story, it had to be typed up first. That made sense to me, since all the stories I read were in books, which is to say, they were typeset. In my very young mind, that equaled “typed.” So I was very excited to learn how to type and practiced for hours every day.
Some kids get pianos; I got a Smith-Corona.
The result is that almost all of my early writing exists on aged, brittle typing paper from the 1970s. That is, however, the only place they exist. They have never been digitized or transcribed and, if I am lucky, never will be!
Today, though, stories don’t end up in hard-copy form unless someone decides to make it happen. Whether it’s a computer printout or a professionally typeset novel, creating a physical version is not the default and is only the result of purposeful, conscious choice.
You might not realize it, but this represents a paradigm-breaking development in the history of writing and publishing.
I have already written about Writing in Public, about how the digital-first world of writing has taken the “tsunami of crap” out of people’s desk drawers and trunks in the attic to put all our first drafts online. There are many authors today who build entire subscription platforms around their first drafts, posting chapters that are unedited and unrefined and are understood to be “under construction.”
The corollary is that in the digital world we inhabit today, the process of revision has fundamentally changed as well. The phase of multiple rewrites that once meant multiple pages of paper, changing typewriter ribbons regularly, and retyping whole paragraphs in order to fix a small error (😭😭😭) or restructure a story, has become significantly shorter and less resource-intensive. You open your writing app, fix the typo, and voila! Revised! The manuscript likely was born digitally and will be remade and rewritten and edited primarily in a digital environment. Sure, many of us still print out hard copies for editing by hand, but that is usually a late-stage process and is done by choice, not requirement.
Those of us old enough to have started writing before computers took over the world remember when the reverse was true. Hard-copy was how all writing started, whether longhand or typed on an actual typewriter.
From start to finish, hard-copy was all that existed.
Writing usually started out long-hand in notebooks or journals or on blank pages. Writers who wanted something in a version of ‘printed’ and not longhand used typewriters. Drafts would be typed up by secretaries or wives for submission to agents or magazines. By the 1960s, electric typewriters were inexpensive enough to be purchased for home use, which my Mother did almost as soon as she was married and had a home of her own. “Desktop publishing” meant having a typewriter at home.
The 1980s saw the arrival of actual desktop publishing on “personal computers” like the Mac SE/30, heralded by Aldus Pagemaker. However, that was out of reach for most writers, and a bit to technologically esoteric to invest thousands of dollars into.
But word processing programs like WordStar (1978), WordPerfect (1979), and MS Word (1983) were more accessible and available on cheap(er) computers, even if they were initially treated more like exotic digital typewriters primarily meant to get text onto paper, with the digital version of the document used mostly for typo and spelling error checks.
It wasn’t until personal computers came of age (and got a lot cheaper) in the 1990s that large numbers of writers made the switch to writing digitally first. It took a decade or so, but today most writers work digitally, using apps like MS Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, OpenOffice, and more. Some still begin their writing process longhand, but revisions happen digitally.
That is to say: digitally speaking, the written word is transient.
I can log into any of my blogs, new or old, pull up a post from years ago, and edit it. I can go into any book I’ve self-published, change it, and upload that file so it replaces the old one. In fact, I did that a couple of years ago with my entire back catalog simply to take out any and all references to Harry Potter. I did not make any major changes other than that (and a few sorely-needed grammar/typo corrections), but all it cost me was time. It was a seamless process, and the only evidence that other versions of the books ever existed are in the very few paperback copies that were printed way back in the day.
This power of course can be (and has been) used maliciously, but I think most writers generally are not interested in that kind of prank.
Yet, we are often too shy to acknowledge the freedom it gives us.
Many writers still grapple with the lingering idea that writing must be perfect before it goes public because “we can’t change it once it’s out there.” This notion stems from that old world of finite resources and finite revisions, where a published book was enshrined permanently.
We all want our work to be the best that it can be, but I’ve watched far too many writers get mired by the fear of “being imperfect in public.” The idea that putting any writing out in the world that isn’t faultless keeps them locked in place, unable to share their work at all.
I’d like to propose the idea that in our digital world, such “repairs to the text” are no longer a big deal.
Even for traditionally published authors whose books primarily exist as print runs, smaller print runs and print-on-demand technology mean that changes to the master copy can be easily be reflected in future printed versions. It’s not an investment of thousands of dollars to fix that embarrassing typo on page 117.
In a world where it’s easy to share a story or piece of writing at any stage, the process of rewriting should feel less intimidating for writers. We all bewail it, of course, and sometimes editing our work really is hard work, but I think the sheer volume of content needing revision (it’s that ye olde Tsunami of Crap again!) ought to make revision of our own work less intimidating in comparison.
This shift in outlook challenges the tradition of hiding imperfect, early drafts from prying eyes. In the past, stories seemed to appear fully formed as published novels or magazine short stories because to do otherwise was to invite financial ruin by way of reprint costs.
Today, we’re free to share our works-in-progress, invite feedback, and revise openly because mistakes are easy to fix and revisions are simple to make. I know that’s not much of a balm to the soul for writers plagued by perfectionism and imposter syndrome, but overall, I believe that this new landscape of public revisioning can change how we approach the craft of writing and rewriting for the better.
Personally, I like to consider it an opportunity for authors to step more fully into the process of writing rather than suffering in silence for years trying to achieve the perfection of publishing.
