Reviving the Story

When you go back to your old neighborhood, former school or a place that loomed large in your childhood and it doesn’t look the same as you remembered it, there’s a change, like something happened since you were last there. The houses look smaller, the school halls shorter, that park tinier.

Time has made its mark.

It’s the same scene, different feel.

It’s a lot like revision.

You have entered stage three of the personal writing process. The depiction. It’s time to revise, reinterpret, represent the hard work you have done and transform it into something you can call art.

On the surface, revision can feel like repetition. You worked on those passages for hours, days and weeks. What use could there be in going back over the story, again?

Revising offers the chance to see what you made as if for the first time. A re-visioning.

Seeing it again with new eyes can revive the writer and the story.

The first step of the last phase in writing memoir.

Photo by Laura Rivera (Unsplash)

Coming Up

“Literary Letters: Essays in Epistle,” Story Story Chicago (single session), March 20, 2024

“The Jewish Spirit of Hope,” Ritualwell (six weeks online), March 13-April 17, 2024