Exhibit 2.26

On Revision

I've had a new batch of short stories I've been working on recently, and as the editing process stretches into its second month I've been trying to understand if I've gotten any better at editing since school or if I've simply slid from being forced to toil on my own writing to a state of slothful ambivalence about my own work. These are among the first stories I haven't workshopped at all, and while initially nervous about how I would know when they are ready, I've come to the opinion that that is exactly the wrong question.

After graduate school, where the impetus is to write to please an audience of 10 or so other writers who must say something, I found myself reading my own work through that fractured, schizophrenic paradigm. Each sentence or movement that might need a defense in a workshop would be given one in the text. Each character would have to be guarded against inevitabilities like How does that relationship grow? or I really want more time with _____. That commentary can be (and often is) valid, but it also can (and often does) lead to cluttered, stagnant writing in various forms of self-competition.

This is not to suggest graduate school, the workshop, or the writers in those workshops are not great tools for editing a story. Certainly they are, and I have little interest in attacking creative writing programs, specifically in all of the usual ways about producing boring, homogenized work. (More than anything, creative writing programs [and the journals they've brought with them] have seemingly increased the number of writers, or at the very least have increased our exposure to said writers [which, regardless of quality, is a positive]. But naturally, some of those writers write boring, uninspired stuff. Some don't. Sadly, I'm firmly in the former [as evidenced by these absurd parentheticals]).

And so I'm relieved to feel like I've finally begun to shake off the workshop when it comes to reading my own work. With these new stories, all of the awfulness can be read with a personal rather than a public embarrassment, and the rare moment where something seems to be working--and the moments are rare, about as rare as having two sodas fall from a soda machine with only one dollar--can be read without the unnecessary pull towards consensus. These stories have problems, decisions are made, and the product is pushed out the door in manila envelopes for slush piles across the country. For now, I'm finished with them. And unlike my earliest submissions from graduate school, I feel comfortable saying that.

One of the primary lessons of the workshop is that a story is never "finished" or "perfect." There's always another draft, another opinion, another change, etc. These are all fine things to say, and certainly I would say them to students. What gets lost in making that point, however is that stories are finished. As writers, it's perfectly natural (and probably helpful) to view all work as incomplete. What I've published still itches me when read in a journal (I want to write every single person who's read the story an apology, promising to send them a new copy of the journal with an edited version of my story taped inside). As readers, however, the story is a finished product and thank god. The worst reading I did in my life was done while under the misguided, workshop-inspired notion of the inherently flawed text.

In a workshop, a story is read as a draft, but this is not and should not be how stories are read outside of the workshop. As important as it is for writers to understand they need not stop, it is equally as important to understand that someday they must. I've never been in a workshop that's pronounced a story complete, and I can't imagine it happens very often. It's shallow criticism to say that a story like "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" would probably be critiqued by graduate students for its shocking twist of tone in the end--the very thing that makes it such a fantastic story--but it is worth saying that it's the workshop's imperative to find fault and, if the author is considerate of the workshop's comments, he or she will be pulled toward revision and incompletion. And, if you want to make the argument, mediocrity.

So, like a little boy who just learned to use the potty, I feel an absurd amount of pride in doing what I am supposed to do when I make a choice, edit the text, and send a story out the door. It'll come back, and I'll take another look at it someday, but I no longer feel compelled by the notion of revision as mythical story-maker.

Maybe all of this is a rambling way of saying that the workshop privileges revision over writing, and I think that's at best wrong and at worst harmful. Revision is essential, but it's not the sort of thing that should hamstring a writer or make them consensus dependent. For me, post-graduate school, I'm starting to think revision's a thing best done like a long drive, alone or with one or two others after having made a clear decision about where you're going. (That last sentence may be the worst thing I've ever written, but everyone else has writing metaphors and I want one too).

I am, of course, probably wrong about everything.