Structural Engineering

On revision and patience

Good morning, readers.

Audrey Hepburn and Orangey the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), dir. Blake Edwards

I’ve been knitting a lot this winter. One of my resolutions for 2025¹ is to knit something non-rectangular; I know my weaknesses and for years I’ve been afraid to try anything that requires more than a bare minimum of counting ability, but in the end my desire to knit myself a sweater has become stronger than my desire to completely zone out during mindless repetitions, and so far is stronger than my deep disgust at not being immediately great at something. I regret to admit that it’s been good for my attention span, forcing me to hold numbers or parts of a pattern in my head for an extended period and focus intently on something². It also feels good to use a different part of my brain, one that is creative in a physical rather than verbal way. It feels more like baking than writing, although knitting has its own narrative to it.

When you learn to knit you learn about “reading” your knitting: the ability to look at a piece and see the individual elements that make up the whole: identifying a stitch, or counting rows, etc. Essential for both understanding where you’ve come from and where you’re going, for orienting yourself to the garment and to the pattern. Ideally, if you’re checking in with your item regularly, mistakes can be caught before they become permanent/super annoying to fix.

I’ve made some progress. Using a very beginner-friendly pattern, I’ve completed two socks—what might normally be referred to as a pair, but in this case maybe applicable in name only. Despite following the same pattern both times with the same materials, the differences between the two jumped out at me when I tried them on for the first time: among others a difference in tension and some weird extra stitches and misaligned decreases on the first sock that make the toe a bit too long, almost elfin. Nothing egregious but not right, especially when laid out next to its slightly better-formed sibling.

Some mistakes can be fixed. With knitting, there can be a time limit; ignore mistakes too long and become baked into the item, buried beneath layers of work. Depending on where the mistake is and the nature of it it often becomes more practical to undo the thing and start fresh. In this case I used cheapish yarn on purpose so I could keep that first sock as an artifact of the practice, something I can look back on to see how far I’ve come. I didn’t notice the misaligned decreases, for instance, until I saw the second more symmetrical sock and realized how that line was supposed to go. I remind myself that learning things takes time, that I am still smart when I don’t pick up a new skill immediately, that some things are worth spending time on even when they don’t turn out perfectly. Yesterday I cast on for a third sock; we’ll see how many it takes me to get to a serviceable pair.

I have two short stories currently on my desk for revision, stories I “finished” in 2023 that have been submitted, edited, shuffled, (in one case, edited down into flash and then back out again) and submitted again, racking up a pile of rejections. Every so often they return a tiered³ rejection, generating enough encouragement for another try. As much as I’m grateful for the feedback I’ve gotten on both (from editors and readers), there’s something the stories need that a better opening line or smoother dialogue isn’t going to fix. Something in the momentum, pacing, structure, inner workings of the story isn’t clicking.

I like to pretend I’m revising by focusing on line edits, little word replacements and tweaks to paragraphs to make things a little tighter, a little more consistent in tone. Essential work (and a not-small part of my day job) but also a far cry from the deep, thoughtful, structural change that the story is crying out for. Rewriting as opposed to true revision.

First draft vs. previous round editing draft

Part of me wishes revising was as easy as pointing to a wonky stitch or out-of-place decrease and saying aha, there’s the problem! I will simply learn how not to do that/do it right next time and the next draft will be Good! On some level I suppose that does happen— with enough practice writers (and especially good readers) can identify their tics or weak spots, root them out— but really, even without that level of skill that’s the fun of it, the experimentation, the trial and error inherent to making art. More so than the rejection emails it’s when the process of experimentation stops feeling fun and instead feels pointless, or rote, that it’s a sign that it’s Drawer Time, aka time for a good cooling-off period before I look at the thing again. (A sign that I often resist, because it feels so good to be done with things, to feel the sense of accomplishment hitting SAVE on that final_FINAL document, and it’s tempting to give in a little too quick.)

Because I don’t know what the fix is right now, because I’m working without a pattern⁴, some structural and form-based questions I’m asking myself as I read back my work are:

• Why does the story start where/when it does? How would it affect the action if I moved the start a [page/section] later?

• What’s the problem or conflict here, and is it clear? (Clear to the reader, not just inside my head.)

• Are things actually happening, or am I spending my energy on setting and character study? (Not bad in and of themselves, but a balance issue.)

• Where in the story do I want the reader to feel surprised? Are the elements of surprise there, or am I misdirecting/obfuscating and confusing that for surprise (and momentum)?

• How is the rhythm of the story? (As a whole, not on the sentence level at this time.) (I tend to have slow beginnings and rushed endings.)

• What would happen if I changed the POV/tense of this story? (Even if I don’t want to actually change it, what happens if I pretend?)

• Why does the story end where it does? Has it earned its resolution, or does it feel tacked on, cliche, arbitrary?

• Has something important changed for the characters since the first page, or are we simply a bit further ahead in time?

Ideally, spending time on these will get me a little closer to a matched pair, a story that looks and feels more like the story in my head. And if not, well, then maybe it’s just time to cast on the third sock.

With love,

C

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A few things I’ve been reading, watching, & consuming lately:

• A Winslet/Jack Black-only edit of The Holiday Nathan made (for me!) got a shoutout on our favorite podcast Blank Check, which was so fun (and kind of surreal to hear while, like, sitting in my cubicle!) (around 2:22)⁵.

• Truly sick amounts of Zillow & similar listings. When I close my eyes at night I see cheap kitchen cabinets and crooked LVP flooring. And look at how fucked-up the fireplace is on this Victorian house! Flippers to JAIL.

• Thamy, from her newsletter Raised by TV, on nationalism & her experience as an undocumented kid.

• Brittany Allen’s interview with RaMell Ross, director of Nickel Boys (my top film of 2024), in LitHub.

• “Girls on the Beach,” by Katherine Kulpa, in HAD.

• Private Rites, by Julia Armfield. Loved it, love queer watery climate change family drama; would teach it with The Morningside by Téa Obreht and Karen Russell’s “The Gondoliers.”

• Kyle MacLachlan’s tribute to David Lynch </3

• Max Read on Benson Boone and FYP-core:⁶

  What do I mean by that? “Beautiful Things” establishes a particular mood--bittersweet, positive, earnest, somewhat uplifting--that befits influencer-style content. It’s vaguely retro in a way that feels “timeless” and unaffiliated to any particular moment or subculture. And, maybe most importantly, it’s built around a unmissable break or transition that lends itself to Capcut edits. (So much short-form video is structured as a before/after or a setup/punchline.)

• The movie A Real Pain, which was fun and also a lot more moving than I expected. Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg have gotten a small amount of guff for playing the same characters they “always” do, but I think their dynamic feels sweet and unforced, and there were a few lines especially (something like “you’re a cool guy stuck in the body of someone who’s always late for something”) that have lingered with me.

• and A Different Man, which I thought was great and a lot of fun, sort of The Substance in New York.

• and lastly (in our big Oscars rush) we saw The Brutalist. I have mixed feelings about the second half— not because “it was a slog,” as a lot of the internet seems to think (in reality, I thought the movie was extremely well-paced for being so long, and I love an intermission⁷)— but more that it felt aggressively on the nose, maybe too literal. The whole movie is extremely transparent, and I think at a certain point I was longing for a little suggestion, rather than half-covering my eyes as I waited for the many Chekovian guns loaded in first act to fire. And even as I type this I do feel compelled to admire it for being both so large and so single-minded. It’s interesting.

• This article in The Point, by Sam Kriss, on alt lit. Wish it were MORE critical of many of these assholes or the simmering misogyny/cryptobroism/conservatism in the genre (or Tao L*n personally) imo but an interesting read.

  A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either.

• This video of a humpback whale briefly swallowing a kayaker. Wish it were me!!

1. I am a virgo, I have a list

2. I do put The X-Files on for some background noise while I’m in the longer repeat sections; my little ADHD brain can only take so much.

3. Colloquially, a rejection that has a personal element or is a bit warmer, not the standard form rejection.

4. Shooting without a script, for my fellow geeks that watched Rent a few too many times in high school

5. Their subsequent episode on Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was also particularly soothing. Three hours of my podcast friends talking about why one of my favorite movies is so good/how Harrison Ford is the hottest man that ever lived? Just a nice little bath for my tired brain.

6. I also have some nascent thoughts on how fascinating it is that Mormons look like that now, as someone that perhaps came of age during the birth & peak years of the Evangelical “cool Youth pastor.”

7. Shoutout to the guy I heard during intermission explaining to his companion, “No, I don’t think he’s a real guy. I’m not sure if Doylestown is [real], though.”