Exposed Revision

What I mean is...

I hope you are all doing as well as can be expected despite what’s been for many (not all) of us the shock of the U.S. election. I hope you’re giving yourself some space to rest and breathe and find some good. I’m writing to you from on a cruise ship, touring Southeast Asia. Of all things. It’s good, this distance, this distraction. I mean, it’s been good to be outside myself for a little while. I’m very grateful to be a tourist at this discombobulating time.

I mean it’s odd, too, but I’m grateful.

Our Vietnamese tour guide told us the people in his country are glad Trump won. It made us laugh a little, but he was serious. We all come at this living from different perspectives. That was interesting to see, from someone so far away from America, and it was good in its way, too.

I mean it took us out of ourselves. And that was good. It was a break from being all up in ourselves and our anguish and worries, if only for a minute.

Anyway, there’s good everywhere, right? Even now. Check out these awesome clouds, for instance. I saw these just before dawn the other morning, on the South China Sea:

Something a little different

So I want to do something a little different today for your prompt. I want you to play around with hesitation, haltingness (a made up word), or discombobulation. I want you to flow with a character who’s been thrown off-kilter, maybe, as many of us have this past week. Today’s prompt has you creating a piece that demonstrates a narrator editing or second-guessing themselves as they tell a story. I think you will enjoy this prompt as it allows for a somewhat looser writing style than we flash writers typically employ.

Here is an excerpt from the story, “Underthings,” by Susan Steinberg, published in Barcelona Review:

“I should have started with this: After my boyfriend hit me in the face with the book, everything stopped. And followed with: I mean the rain and every blade of grass and every leaf on every tree and air and light and time and

I should have started with this: After my boyfriend hit me in the face with the book, everything started. And followed with:

I should say there were good times with my boyfriend. The morning after he ran to the street, we laughed pretty hard. We laughed at his saying, They want me. And at my saying, No one wants you. And we laughed at the sound the tires made. And at the person who screamed. And at his dumb-as-shit questions. And my dumb-as-shit answers. We laughed pretty much all morning.”

Do click on the link and read the whole story when you have time. Note how Steinberg second-guesses herself all through the telling of this story: “I should have started with this” and “I should say.” It is a story she’s uncomfortable telling, so she keeps working her way into the truth. For me, she makes powerful use of exposed revision.

See also Megan Giddings’s story, “The Alive Sister,” which employs exposed revision:

“This is supposed to be a story. It should have two black sisters playing in a park. One twelve and the other ten. They will be playing with foam bats. An older woman, probably white — but I will wonder in revisions and even while I’m typing the word in the first draft if I need to make that obvious and is it too obvious or too little or too far — will call the police about the disturbance. Maybe I’ll tell you why she does it…”

I found—and expanded upon—a prompt from a terrific article by Mike Young and Elisa Gabbert: “Moves in Contemporary Poetry” that was published a few years ago in HTML Giant. The examples given are from poetry, but what I love about this prompt is its potential for conveying a number of interesting things in a flash fiction. Let’s look at a few:

• hesitancy - why is this character unsure or unwilling to say what really happened? do they feel unsafe or do they lack confidence?

• lies - allows your reader to see a character lying and to ponder why, consider how lies serve to control and manipulate in abusive relationships

• denial - consider a character’s trauma or attempt at psychological self-protection, consider how someone who has been gaslit might not be totally sure what is real

• unreliability

• misremembering

• characterization - maybe self-doubt or hesitancy is part of your character’s psychological make up

YOUR PROMPT (with thanks to Mike Young & Elisa Gabbert):

1) Exposed revision

Example: Alice Fulton’s “About Face“:

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It’s intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

1b) Variation: Revision by way of “I mean”

Example: “Confession” by Suzanne Wise:

I can only imagine
how hard it must be for you
to believe me. I mean, to hold
blame. I mean, to be you.

Some possible approaches

Now, flash writers, you might consider using strikeouts as a means of directly showing revision.

You may write a epistolary flash, a letter to someone, as it’s being drafted. It would be fun to play with presentation such that it looks like some bits are smudged as if not completely erased.

You all know by now, I typically encourage writing without hedging of any kind, writing with conviction, but there’s room for it here as you convey a blurred truth, an unreliable narrator, or the hesitancy that may come from some unspoken pain or trauma.

Or again, you may simply convey hesitancy directly in the language as is shown in the examples above (“I should have started with”, or “I mean” or “I almost wrote” or some such).

Ask yourself why your character is unable or unwilling to be straightforward.

Hope you enjoy experimenting with exposed revision, my friends.

Love & Peace to all. Stay strong, my loves.

Kathy