How to beat Reviser’s Block

This article is for: Everyone!

The longer you write poetry, the more you come to realize that:

Revision (or editing, or redrafting) is the most important part of the whole process.

Or, as one my favorite sayings about writing tells us,

“There’s no such thing as good writing, only good re-writing.”

In other words, it’s not our first ideas that determine how good poem ends up: it’s how we rework and reshape them, from draft to draft.

That being the case, revising your poems is vital.

Unfortunately, it’s something that many writers can find very difficult to do—or even to start!

In fact, I’ve seen so many poets struggle to get going on revision, that I think there’s another kind of Block to add to Writer’s Block:

Reviser’s Block.

And like Writer’s Block, Reviser’s Block is painful and holds you back. So in this article, I’m going to go over:

What Reviser’s Block is, and how to overcome it!

Does Reviser’s Block exist?

Yes, it does! Actually, I think it might be more common than writer’s block.

By Reviser’s block, I mean:

A reluctance or inability to substantially rework poems that have already been drafted at least once.

And by substantially, I mean making bigger changes than just finessing a word choice here or there. I am thinking of times when you know a poem needs some fairly major work. Things like:

When a poem needs a new section or sections added
When a poem has promising parts but doesn’t work overall, and you’re not sure why
When the voice needs changing
When a poem is too long and needs substantial cutting that will change it significantly
When the form needs adjustment—maybe adding more form, or fixing a form that’s not working yet.

So, in other words, changes that have the potential to transform a poem—but that also can be hard!

Lots of poets have this problem—including some who are prolific when it comes to writing first drafts. I used to be like this too: I was in love with the gleeful energy of beginning a poem, but shy and scared of what seemed like the hard, cold work of revising the ones that didn’t work straightaway.

What causes Reviser’s Block?

If you have trouble getting down to revision and redrafting, you may tell yourself a lot of reasons why you can’t start revising right now. Things like:

I don’t have time.
I have too many ideas for new poems. If I don’t write them down now, I’ll lose them.
Why would I want to revise? It’s not as fun as writing first drafts.
I don’t know what to do to revise.

And some of these may have some truth, especially lack of time.

But almost always, the deep cause of Reviser’s Block is fear.

Fear of messing up the revision, and making the poem no better or perhaps even worse. Fear of your new work not matching up to the hopes you have for the poem. Fear of not fulfilling the expectations and advice of others, if you’ve had feedback on the poem. Fear that you don’t know enough about poetry. Or simply fear that you are, in some way, not good enough.

And all this is a shame, because really, revising a poem can be easily as exciting and rewarding as writing the first draft—if not more so!

The thrill you get as you suddenly see a new way a poem could go, and you watch it improve by leaps and bounds under your very eyes, is tremendously fulfilling.

I find it more powerful than the pleasure of first-drafting, because I feel I’ve solved a harder problem, or answered a more complex question. More was demanded of me and my poetry skills, and I rose to the demand—and probably learned something by doing so, too.

So, it definitely pays to move out of the dread, and embrace revision instead of hiding from it.

Ways to make revision easier to start

I hope I’ve convinced you that revision is at least worth trying out. And maybe you’re all ready to start right now!

But just in case you’re not, for the rest of this article I want to go through several tools or approaches that you can use to make revision work for you.

1. Schedule a time

One of the things that can happen in Reviser’s Block is that you keep putting off the work.

You might say, “I’ll do it when I feel ready,” or, “It’ll happen sometime, when the moment is right. I don’t want to pressure it.”

If you’re doing this, I have two uncomfortable truths for you:

You will probably never feel ready
Revision almost never happens spontaneously.

To make revision happen, you just have to make it happen!

The best way to do this is to schedule a time when you’re going to revise, and stick to it.

Use someone else as an accountability buddy if you need to, or promise yourself a treat once you’ve done it—any trick is OK—but stick to it!

I learned this rather late, when I was doing my MFA. At the end of every semester I had to revise 10-15 poems to hand in to my workshop professors. All semester I would delay revision, using all kinds of excuses—but with deadline approaching, eventually I just had to pick two days when I was going to do nothing but revision, and do it.

And you know what? Once I got started, I loved those two days!

But if choosing a time still terrifies you, combine this approach with the next one to take off some pressure.

2. Revise for 15 minutes

One of my tips for beating writer’s block in general is to “Write for 15 Minutes.”

In a nutshell, shortening your writing time lowers the stakes, which lowers your anxiety, and makes it possible to start. (For more detail, please read this article.)

Well, the same goes for revision.

How much can you really get done in 15 minutes of revision? Not a whole lot—so it doesn’t really matter what you do, right? You can just try out a little thing here or there, and not worry about it.

And by doing this, you free yourself up—just a little bit, but that first bit is what matters! If you keep on doing 15 minutes regularly, you’ll find three things happen:

The small amounts of work add up to some really significant changes.
You become more confident and creative about your revision.
You start to want to revise for longer, and feel good about doing so.

It really works!

More than any other advice in this article, this tip has saved me more times than I want to count.

3. Set two intentions

One of the obstacles to revision can be the hopes and expectations that we have for a poem.

As more and more time passes since the first draft, it’s easy to dream that the final version of the poem will do more and more—like use form originally, have a lively voice, sound beautiful, use rhyme perfectly, etc., etc, etc..

The more of these that accrete in our minds, the more difficult it can become to start revision, because there’s more and more burden on it! What if you don’t achieve everything you want to? Won’t the poem be a failure then?

In order to start revision at all, and to be able to revise joyfully, it’s important to take your wishes and dreams back down to a manageable level.

A simple but powerful way to do this is to set just two main intentions for the finished poem.

Decide what these will be when you start revising.

For example, they might be something like this:

“1. Convey the moment of the memory vividly.”
“2. Experiment with using slant rhyme.”

You can probably already see how this eases the tensions. Two clear intentions like that don’t seem so hard to address, do they?

Again, I did this with my batches of MFA revision, and it worked like a charm—especially when I had lots of workshop advice on each poem, which often pointed in different directions! I used the Two Intentions to help me decide what I wanted.

My last word on this is to write the intentions down when you first start revising the poem. This will make them more definite and give them more weight.

4. Batch it

Like writing in general, revision is easier when you’re already revising.

Once you get into the revision groove, you can flow through poem after poem pretty easily.

So a great way to get through revision is to revise several poems at a time, one after another.

Again, I learned this when revising up to 15 MFA poems in two days. After one or two poems, “revision thinking” became second nature. I’ve also found this to be true when preparing book manuscripts too.

Moreover, you may find it easier to separate first-drafting time from revision time like this: you can spend a month just creating new poems, and then spend the next month revising them all.

That way, when you make a poem, you don’t need to feel any pressure to revise it for a while. You can just add it to the batch for the next revision time, knowing you’ll get to it eventually.

5. Stop Sooner

Another thing that you may fear about revision is that idea that it’s going to go on forever.

You probably already know the experience of getting lost in editing a poem, tinkering with a word here, or a line break there, again and again and again, with seemingly no end....

After all, didn’t Auden say, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned?”

Well, yes, all that’s true. It’s certainly possible to fall into that hole—and if that happens, it’s often exhausting and demoralizing, as you strive for a final, perfect version of the poem that never arrives.

Naturally, that can make starting revision quite intimidating.

So to guard against that, and to neutralize that fear, I recommend trying to use something like the “80-20 rule” in your revision.

Instead of trying to perfect the poem in one attempt, aim to create a new draft that just moves the poem on a bit.

And when you’ve done that, stop.

This is a much lower requirement than perfection! And therefore easier to start, and easier to achieve.

It does mean that you’ll need to loop back to that poem a few times, each time moving it forward only a bit.

But it also makes the task of revision lighter and more fun. And, I believe, leads to better results too, as you leave more time for ideas about the poem to bubble up.

6. Keep all your old versions

I hope you do this anyway, but just in case—Never throw away an old draft!

One the one hand this is a very practical strategy, because you never know when you might want to return to how you did it in an earlier version.

But on the other hand it’s also a psychological tool. If you’re going to keep every attempt at this poem, then you can’t possibly mess the poem up!

If today’s new version turns out to stink, then tomorrow you can just go back to what you had before, and start again.

It’s a simple strategy, but it may give you an emotional safety net that makes it easier to try things out with freedom.

You can never get it wrong—you just try different approaches until something works!

7. Exploration, not Perfection

This one is also about attitude, and covers similar territory to tip #6, but I think it’s still worth stating.

A great way to kill your enthusiasm for revision is to feel that every time you revise, you have to get it “right.”

As I’ve said a few times now, that’s too much pressure—too big of a task.

But a great way to keep your enthusiasm for the process high is to view each new attempt at the poem as a new chance to play.

It’s sort of like taking the same lump of Play-Doh and molding it into 5, 10, or 100 different shapes. Always fun!

Only it’s even better, because (as I said in #6), in poetry you don’t have to destroy the old shape when you make the new one!

8. Make it fun like a first draft

Finally, if your problem with revision is that it isn’t as engaging as a first draft, then make it a first draft!

I don’t mean this literally, of course. Rather, I mean try to do the things that excite you about first drafts, whenever you start a redraft.

For me, I love the ideas I get from freewriting. I have to do a freewrite before I start every poem, or I’m just lost. So when I start revising a poem. I also do a freewrite—often more than one.

Then the new ideas from that freewrite get me fired up about adding them somehow to the existing poem—and from there on, the revision is just as pleasurable as any first draft.

So repeat whatever gets your creative juices flowing, whether it be music, walking, listing words, or anything else, and use that to bring first-draft energy into the second draft, third draft, and the 53rd draft too!

Last thoughts

I hope you find this advice useful if you’re ever feeling shy and scared about revision. And most of all, I hope you will be able to overcome any fears you have and start reworking poems freely. The best reason for this is, as with most things in poetry, the enjoyment and satisfaction you will get as you see your original ideas grow bigger and better.

In particular, what will happen after a while is that your anxiety over revision will go down as you start to become more confident and familiar with it.

It’s fun on the other side of the revising fence—so do hop over!

Next Steps

How many poems do you have that never made it past a promising first draft? See if you can dig out a good number.
Once you’ve got a group of these, choose 4 or 5 that you most want to rework. Tell yourself how great you’ll feel once you’ve revised them.
Plan several times for revision that will work for you. Make these realistic for your schedule and level of worry!
If you have a whole morning free each week, you might block off two hours then—but only if you feel confident you can use all that time! If not, you might take just 15 minutes of the morning for revision.
If 15 minutes at a time is all you can spare, or if that’s all you feel able to do right now, where can you get 15 minutes on a fairly regular basis?
Decide these three things ahead of time:
—Which poem you’ll tackle first.
—Your two Intentions for that poem.
—Something you can begin with when you do revise. For example, making a list of new metaphors, or freewriting for a new first line.
When the scheduled time comes, MAKE YOURSELF REVISE, come what may! And try not to worry about quality—all that really matters is that you’re doing it.
Then for the next time, repeat steps 4 and 5.

Keep doing this until you feel comfortable being more fluid about revision—or until all the poems are done!