Re-vision

My job—across every corner of my creative life—is to revise. As an agent, I read for satisfying narrative arcs, for character shifts that feel earned, for emotional turns that land cleanly on the page. I read the same story again and again, each time noticing what it’s trying to become. I help shape manuscripts and illustrations so that other people can revise them, guiding the drafts toward the version of itself that feels inevitable once you see it in the end.

As a writer, revision is an essential part of my language. It’s how I close the distance between what I meant and what I managed to say, however incompletely, the first time around.

Personal reflection also holds the potential for revision, insofar that it can help re-trace the path of a day or a year or a season, seeing what only distance reveals.

Often, we talk about revision as if it were correction: “the draft was wrong; now we make it right” or “the sketch was off kilter; now it’s on point.” We identify the broken places and mend them. We cut what doesn’t serve. We tighten, adjust, clarify, repair.

This is revision at one level, and it’s necessary work. But the word itself holds something larger.

I like to think of revision as experiencing a re-vision of a piece. To see again. To have vision, once more, for something we made when we had a more limited scope of what it was, and what it could become.

A first draft isn’t a failed attempt at the final book—it’s the only book that could have been written from inside the initial moment of making it. We can’t see the shape of what we’re building while we’re still laying the first round of bricks.

Revision offers a different vantage point. We step outside. We return to the pages and the panels not as the person who made them, but as a reader encountering them fresh. And in that, something shifts: our capacity to see what the story is reaching toward.

When you live inside creative work long enough, you start to notice how this way of seeing bleeds outward.

How easily I slip into “re-seeing” conversations, situations, relationships, choices. A moment that felt ambiguous at the time acquires new dimensionality later. A storyline in life that once made no sense shifts slightly and reveals a new takeaway. Even the perplexing subplots we all carry—the ones that resist easy categorization—become clearer when approached with a reviser’s eye rather than a search for perfect resolution in the moment.

We’re in a month that especially invites reflection: the recaps, the lessons learned, the resolutions already crystallizing for January. Something about December implies we can look back at the arc of the year and retrospectively rearrange it into something neater, and more streamlined; something that makes sense.

We can’t, of course. Life is not a draft. The words were said or they weren’t. The events unfolded as they did. Risks were taken or deferred, kindness was shared or not. What’s done is genuinely, irreversibly done.

There’s another sort of looking back that doesn’t require the past to be different. Not revision as improvement, but “re-vision” as expanded sight. We return to the same scenes, the same problems, the same moments that seemed opaque while we were living them—and we see something we couldn’t see before. The facts don’t change. But the meaning might rearrange, revealing a through line that was untraceable before.

There are my own stories from this year, and years past, that I’m still re-visioning. I return to them the same way I return to a dummy or a sketch: examining character motivations I thought I understood, reconsidering plot beats that seemed incidental at the time, noticing where the line weight was heavier than I realized at first glance. I’m still tracing arcs.

The year behind me isn’t a manuscript to correct. It’s one I get to read again, with everything I know now that I didn’t know then. Some takeaways are finally visible, and others are still emerging, revealing themselves slowly, the way meaning always does when we’re patient enough to let it.

This isn’t nostalgia and it isn’t self-editing. It’s a creative posture. A willingness to hold time the way you hold a manuscript, with the same generous attention you’d offer a story you believed in, but couldn’t yet see fully.

Here is what I’ve learned from years of sitting with writers in revision: the ones who struggle most are the ones who arrive defended.

They believe they already know precisely what the book is and what it could be. They believe they know what works, without even glancing briefly at other opportunities. They’ve already decided that the whole work is non-negotiable. They come to the manuscript gripping it like it’s something fragile to protect from the cruel world.

But revision asks the opposite of us. It asks us to hold our own work loosely. To approach the pages with genuine questions, rather than answers we’re trying to confirm. What is this, actually? What’s it trying to become? What’s here that I haven’t been able to see?

The willingness to be uncertain about your own story is what makes “re-seeing” possible.

I think the same is true for how we hold our lives. If we’re too sure about what a year meant, about what should have happened, or what those things implied, we can’t see anything new.

Revision, in craft and in life, is a willingness to look again with trust that something will shift if we shift our perspective.

Next year, I’ll be teaching a workshop on revision in storytelling. We’ll talk about arcs and pacing and the practical craft of returning to pages. But underneath the technique, there’s something more abstract: the idea that revision is a practice of humility. It asks us to accept that we couldn’t see everything the first time, and that this isn’t failure. It’s the condition of making things.

The gift is that we get to look again.

Glimmers to share

✨I Love LA is a hilarious and unhinged new show that I cannot get enough of. My takeaways include notes for my upcoming LA trip and how I’m thinking about children’s book influencers more than ever before in my life (the show isn’t about kidlit, but it’s based around influencers and PR).

✨Words on Warren is a new children’s bookstore in Tribeca. For us Kathleen Kelly fans, this is a real-life Shop Around the Corner that is worth defending against the Joe Fox’s of the world. They call themselves “purveyors of books and childhood memories,” and I think that's perfect.

✨Christmas Tree Season!