A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions

Learning how to revise may well be the most excruciating part of writing - frequently it is what makes or breaks new writers. Now, in this unique and highly useful book, Jay Woodruff gives some of America's finest contemporary writers an opportunity to talk with passion and professionalism about revision - about the hard work of their writing.
Books on writing generally offer prescriptions and proscriptions about this "craft so hard to learn" instead of evidence. But in A Piece of Work Woodruff's incisive questions guide five writers - Tobias Wolff, Tess Gallagher, Robert Coles, Joyce Carol Oates, and Donald Hall - through specific examples that enable the reader to see how good writing becomes better. From the first draft through various revisions and finally to the printed version of a single piece of each author's work, Woodruff traces the full course of the revision process.
While we might prefer to picture all authors as Coleridge, with the perfectly formed lines and stanzas of "Kubla Khan" emerging from a dream, the truth of the matter is that the development of a final text is often as much a hard-won discovery as it is an initial inspiration. A Piece of Work offers a road map to that discovery.

Writing is a process, and revising is less a separate activity from writing than a part of that process. True, there are those writers who claim that revision, for them, is a matter of dotting i's and crossing t's. But for most writers, it is the revising of a piece of work that is the most considered aspect of their art. In A Piece of Work, Jay Woodruff has interviewed five writers--Robert Coles, Tess Gallagher, Donald Hall, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff--about their revision processes. Included with each "interview" (I use quotes because the interviews themselves were subjected to the scrutiny of revision) is an example of the author's work--be it fiction, essay, or poetry--and copies of the drafts that preceded it. "I hoped," writes Woodruff in the book's introduction, "that focusing a lengthy discussion on a single piece of work might provide not only a sense of a given writer's general aesthetic but also a greater incidence of the specific examples that enable the reader to see how good writing becomes better."

Joyce Carol Oates claims to love revising, but she clearly doesn't love to talk about it; still, her many drafts offer great insight into her process. Tobias Wolff doesn't save his drafts ("They embarrass me"), but he is happy to talk about them, while Tess Gallagher is not at all self-conscious about the path to a finished piece: "We start out in these very awkward ways, and we do look a little stupid as we draft," she says, "and that's all right." Implicit in this book is the arrival, sometime, at a finished work, but there isn't always such a thing. "Every draft is a final draft, after a while," says Donald Hall. "But I know from experience that I will probably keep on tinkering." --Jane Steinberg