The Maker’s Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts Essay Example

the discipline or the time to do this. We must read when our judgment may be at its worst, when we are close to the euphoric moment of creation.

Then the writer, counsels novelist Nancy Hale, “should be critical of everything that seems to him most delightful in his style. He should excise what he most admires, because he wouldn’t thus admire it if he weren’t…in a sense protecting it from criticism. ” John Ciardi, the poet, adds, “The last act of the writing must be to become one’s own reader. It is, I suppose, a schizophrenic process, to begin passionately and to end critically, to begin hot and to end cold; and, more important, to be passion-hot and critic-cold at the same time. Most people think that the principal problem is that writers are too proud of what they have written. Actually, a greater problem for most professional writers is one shared by the majority of students. They are overly critical, think everything is dreadful, tear up page after page, never complete a draft, see the task as hopeless. The writer must learn to read critically but constructively, to cut what is bad, to reveal what is good. Eleanor Estes, the children’s book author, explains: “The writer must survey his work critically, coolly, as though he were a stranger to it.

He must be willing to prune, expertly and hard-heartedly. At the end of each revision, a manuscript may look…. worked over, torn apart, pinned together, added to, deleted from, words changed and words changed back. Yet the book must maintain its original freshness and spontaneity. ” Most readers underestimate the amount of rewriting it usually

takes to produce spontaneous reading. This is a great disadvantage to the student writer, who sees only a finished product and never watches the craftsman who takes the necessary step back, studies the work carefully, returns to the task, steps back, returns, steps back, again and again.

Anthony Burgess, one of the most prolific writers in the English-speaking world, admits, “I might revise a page twenty times. ” Roald Dahl, the popular children’s writer, states, “By the time I’m nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least 150 times…Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this. ” Rewriting isn’t virtuous. It isn’t something that ought to be done. It is simply something that most writers find they have to do to discover what they have to say and how to say it. It is a condition of the writer’s life.

There are, however, a few writers who do little formal rewriting, primarily because they have the capacity and experience to create and review a large number of invisible drafts in their minds before they approach the page. And some writers slowly produce finished pages, performing all the tasks of revision simultaneously, page by page, rather than draft by draft. But it is still possible to see the sequence followed by most writers most of the time in rereading their own work. 6 7 8 When students complete a first draft, they consider the job of writing done – and their teachers too often agree.

When professional writers complete a first draft, they usually feel that they are at the start of the writing process. When

a draft is completed, the job of writing can begin. That difference in attitude is the difference between amateur and professional, inexperience and experience, journeyman and craftsman. Peter F. Drucker, the prolific business writer, calls his first draft “the zero draft”–after that he can start counting. Most writers share the feeling that the first draft, and all of those which follow, are opportunities to discover what they have to say and how best they can say it.

To produce a progression of drafts, each of which says more and says it more clearly, the writer has to develop a special kind of reading skill. In school we are taught to decode what appears on the page as finished writing. Writers, however, face a different category of possibility and responsibility when they read their own drafts. To them the words on the page are never finished. Each can be changed and rearranged, can set off a chain reaction of confusion or clarified meaning. This is a different kind of reading which is possibly more difficult and certainly more exciting.

Writers must learn to be their own best enemy. They must accept the criticism of others and be suspicious of it; they must accept the praise of others and be even more suspicious of it. Writers cannot depend on others. They must detach 1 9 2 3 10 11 4 12 Most writers scan their drafts first, reading as quickly as possible to catch the larger problems of subject and form, and then move in closer and closer as they read and write, reread and rewrite. The first thing writers look for in their drafts is information. They know

that a good piece of writing is built from specific, accurate, and interesting information.

The writer must have an abundance of information from which to construct a readable piece of writing. Next writers look for meaning in the information. The specifics must build to a pattern of significance. Each piece of specific information must carry the reader toward meaning. Writers reading their own drafts are aware of audience. They put themselves in the reader’s situation and make sure that they deliver information which a reader wants to know or needs to know in a manner which is easily digested. Writers try to be sure that they anticipate and answer the questions a critical reader will ask when reading the piece of writing.

Writers make sure that the form is appropriate to the subject and the audience. Form, or genre, is the vehicle which carries meaning to the reader, but form cannot be selected until the writer has adequate information to discover its significance and an audience which needs or wants that meaning. Once writers are sure the form is appropriate, they must then look at the structure, the order of what they have written. Good writing is built on a solid framework of logic, argument, narrative, or motivation which runs through the entire piece of writing and holds it together.

This is the time when many writers find it most effective to outline as a way of visualizing the hidden spine by which the piece of writing is supported. The element on which writers spend a majority of their time is development. Each section of a piece of writing must be adequately developed. It must give readers enough

information so that they are satisfied. How much information is enough? That’s as difficult as asking how much garlic belongs in a salad. It must be done to taste, but most beginning writers underdevelop, underestimating the reader’s hunger for more information.

As writers solve development problems, they often have to consider questions of dimension. There must be a pleasing and effective proportion among all the parts of the piece of writing. There is a continual process of subtracting and adding to keep the piece of writing in balance. Finally, writers have to listen to their own voices. Voice is the force which drives a piece of writing forward. It is an expression of the writer’s authority and concern. It is what is between the words on the page, what glues the piece of writing together. A good piece of writing is always marked by a consistent, individual voice.

As writers read and reread, write and rewrite, they move closer and closer to the page until they are doing line-by-line editing. Writers read their own pages with 2 22 infinite care. Each sentence, each line, each clause, each phrase, each word, each mark of punctuation, each section of white space between the type has to contribute to the clarification of meaning. Slowly the writer moves from word to word, looking through language to see the subject. As a word is changed, cut or added, as a construction is rearranged, all the words used before that moment and all those that follow that moment must be considered and reconsidered.

Writers often read aloud at this stage of the editing process, muttering or whispering to themselves, calling on the ear’s experience

with language. Does this sound right – or that? Writers edit, shifting back and forth from eye to page to ear to page. I find I must do this careful editing in short runs, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch, or I become too kind with myself. I begin to see what I hope is on the page, not what actually is on the page. This sounds tedious if you haven’t done it, but actually it is fun.

Making something right is immensely satisfying, for writers begin to learn what they are writing about by writing. Language leads them to meaning, and there is the joy of discovery, of understanding, of making meaning clear as the writer employs the technical skills of language. Words have double meanings, even triple and quadruple meanings. Each word has its own potential of connotation and denotation. And when writers rub one word against the other, they are often rewarded with a sudden insight, an unexpected clarification.

The maker’s eye moves back and forth from word to phrase to sentence to paragraph to sentence to phrase to word. The maker’s eye sees the need for variety and balance, for a firmer structure, for a more appropriate form. It peers into the interior of the paragraph, looking for coherence, unity, and emphasis, which make meaning clear. I learned something about this process when my first bifocals were prescribed. I had ordered a larger section of the reading portion of the glass because of my work, but even so, I could not contain my eyes within this new limit of vision.

And I still find myself taking off my glasses and

bending my nose toward the page, for my eyes unconsciously flick back and forth across the page, back to another page, forward to still another, as I try to see each evolving line in relation to every other line. When does this process end? Most writers agree with the great Russian writer Tolstoy, who said, “I scarcely ever reread my published writings, if by chance I come across a page, it always strikes me: all this must be rewritten; this is how I should have written it. The maker’s eye is never satisfied, for each word has the potential to ignite new meaning. This article has been twice written all the way through the writing process […]. Now it is to be republished in a book. The editors made a few small suggestions, and then I read it with my maker’s eye. Now it has been re-edited, re- 13 14 23 15 24 16 25 17 26 18 27 19 28 20 29 21 revised, re-read, and re-re-edited, for each piece of writing to the writer is full of potential and alternatives. 30 A piece of writing is never finished.

It is delivered to a deadline, torn out of the typewriter on demand, sent off with a sense of accomplishment and shame and pride and frustration. If only there were a couple more days, time for just another run at it, perhaps then… 1. 2. How does Murray define information and meaning (13-14)? Why is the distinction between the two terms important? According to Murray, at what point(s) in the writing process do writers become concerned about the individual words they are using? What do you

think Murray means when he says in paragraph 24 that “language leads [writers] to meaning”?

The phrase “the maker’s eye” appears in Murray’s title and in several places throughout the essay. What do you suppose he means by this? Consider how the maker’s eye could be different from the reader’s eye. According to Murray, when is a piece of writing finished? What, for him, is the function of deadlines? 3. 4. Murray, Donald M. "The Maker’s Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts. ” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, th and Virginia Clark. 8 ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000: 161-165. 3