Kristin Hannah, Leonard Cohen, and the Mystery of the Revision Process

I spend the majority of my writing time revising. I really love the revision process. I don’t show my beta readers or editor my work until I believe the story is as polished as I can make it on my own. (Rereading these opening sentences, I’m reminded of my maternal grandmother reading something I wrote as a young teenager and saying: “‘I, I, I.’ That’s three sentences in a row you started with ‘I’.” That may have been the first time that I became excited about the prospect of revision, the idea that writing can be improved.)

My revision work tends to focus most on story structure, clarifying GMC (goal, motivation, conflict), and characterization. Once I recover from the sad realization that my story isn’t perfect as is, which I inevitably learn from my beta readers and editor, I’m willing to make significant alterations: cutting out characters, changing characterization (oh, goodness, did I really write yet another weepy, insecure heroine? Gentlemen, we can rebuild her!), eliminating or adding whole subplots, dramatically rearranging the order of events. 

I don’t ever want to put a story out into the world until I think it’s the best I can make it. I’m not aiming for perfection. I know my stories will never be perfect. But I do want to get to that place where I’m willing to share the story, trusting that some people will find enjoyment from reading it. 

This means that most of my stories (including nine novels in their second, third, fourth and even more drafts) have not seen the light of day because they’re not there yet. But I hope, I sincerely hope, that they will get there someday. 

No surprise, then, that stories about the lengthy and dramatic revision processes of other writers encourage and even delight me. Here are two I recently heard:

I recently listened to the audiobook of Kristin Hannah’s historical novel The Four Winds, which follows a family in Texas and California during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era. An interview with the author and narrator followed the audiobook. Kristin Hannah spoke about the essential need for interpersonal conflict in a novel and shared that for the first two years of writing this novel, the interpersonal conflict took place between two sisters-in-law: Elsa and Loreda. 

Only after two years of writing did she realize that no, Elsa and Loreda weren’t supposed to be sisters-in-law. They were supposed to be mother and daughter! 

I can’t even imagine how much revising she needed to do to her novel to make that fundamental change, so essential to the final story, through which the theme of mothers and daughters resonates. But knowing that she was willing to make this radical revision and seeing how the story benefited from those changes encourages me as I contemplate radical changes to my own stories, searching for the true story waiting to be born. 

My husband and I recently watched the wonderful documentary, HALLELUJAH: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song. In the film, Leonard Cohen shares that the writing of this beloved song took place over seven years. 

The film shows page after page of handwritten lyrics demonstrating how the writer searched and searched and searched for the right words. The music journalist Larry Sloman who interviewed Cohen numerous times suggested that Cohen may have written as many as 180 different verses to this song before settling on the verses that have become so well known, beginning with this one:

Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord 
that David played and it pleased the Lord, 
but you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, 
The minor falls, the major lifts,
The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

The documentary tells the tale of this song’s creation and its rise from obscurity to its status as the most famous secular hymn ever, as far as I can tell. How wonderful that Leonard Cohen was willing to keep working, keep writing, keep trying different words in different order till he landed on verses that felt true to him! How could any writer not be inspired and encouraged by that story?