Layers Of Concern

A couple of weeks ago I finished How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by novelist, essayist, story writer Alexander Chee.

Though I am mostly focused on writing children's picture books, I often read books and listen to podcasts on the craft of writing for adult fiction and nonfiction. I find that most often, the wisdom and hints shared can just as easily be applied to the writing of picture books, no matter how spare and quiet the book may be. After finishing this excellent collection of essays, I turned to this podcast where he talks about how he revises by the "layers of concern," which I found super helpful, because I often find myself looping backwards and forwards in my revisions without any kind of organizing principle that helps me make progress.

For example, first he reads/revises for imagery—only attending to the imagery in a piece, sentence by sentence, until he has completed full pass of a section or a chapter. Then he starts again at the beginning, only attending to voice. Then again, only attending, perhaps, to a particular character and whether that character feels alive, consistent, and 3-D on the page. In the essay collection, he writes about how in a workshop with Annie Dillard, she circled just the verbs in one of his stories—all the verbs that weren't quite right, the verbs he needed to attend to. 

There is so much good in the podcast, and in the book. And since there is so little to find on the brilliant Annie Dillard (so elusive, rarely gives interviews), the essay in which he writes about his time as her student, "The Writing Life," landed as my favorite essay in the collection.