Film-Editing and the Revision Process: Student as Self-Editor

Film-Editing and the Revision Process: Student as Self-EditorAuthor(s): Ronald PrimeauSource: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 25, No. 5 (Dec., 1974), pp. 405-410Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/356965 .

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ilm-Editing and the Revision Process:

Student as Self-Editor RONALD PRIMEAU

THE HISTORIC DEBATE on whether a writer succeeds through genius or craft seri- ously affects our students' attitudes toward revision. If a student assumes that a writer either has "talent" or doesn't, he might opt for the view that the successful writer is a genius who communicates through inspiration. In such a view, even the "tortured genius" experiences torture in a wrenching creative act that is assumed to be a process distinct from mundane revision. While there is some truth in this position, its implications can be fatal to the teaching of writing as a craft. In these terms, revision becomes remedial work (at best perhaps as interesting as an autopsy) rather than part of a continuity in the writing process itself.

But revision is an integral part of the total compositional process. To isolate it as something that merely cures the ills of earlier drafts-as if it were an imposi- tion of structures from outside rather than growth from within-makes it hard- er to develop individual techniques for revising. The remedial theory of revision also makes it difficult to convince all but would-be editors of its value.

If one can "hold off" long enough, the process of revision can be a most satis- fying climax to the writing experience. If a writer attempts to revise before he is ready, however, he most likely will stifle his productivity and enjoyment with standards of "excellence" that are too rigid to seem valuable. Revision is not patch-work applied to earlier processes; it is an advanced stage of more of

the same but better. Handbooks or

guides to usage provide invaluable checks on the effectiveness of one's final product; but before such agreed-upon conventions of usage can do their job, the writer must be able to rethink his original thoughts, to recreate his full subjective responses, and through self- discipline and self-exploration to force his views into larger or more sharply focused contexts.

The instructor who increases emphasis on revision must often drastically re- duce the number of new writing assignments if the student is to have the time and energy to devote to the various stages of drafting and redrafting even one major piece of writing. The revision process that goes beyond mere "correc- tion" is the kind of revising that au- thors of books, dissertations, and arti- cles go through over a period of weeks, months, or years. The student who is

expected to do 10-15 themes during a term simply does not have the leisure to sustain such revision for each assignment. One danger is the boredom that might seize the student in redoing the same work several times. But hopefully an expanded understanding of revision itself, which helps the student to enrich and expand his own insights in successive drafts, will sooner or later convince him that in re-visioning he is creating something new rather than sifting the remains of the old.

Comparison with other media and art- forms illustrates that the student is often asked to revise before he is ready. The

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key to successful "revision" or "editing" in photography or film-making lies in the production of sufficient shots or footage to make the selection and arrangement of materials meaningful. Just as film- editing requires several shots from various (or even from the same) angles, so also the writer must try out various ways (some even repetitious) of saying and developing his point. Similarly, the danc- er who rehearses or the painter who re- vises on a canvas does not consider his earliest movements, shapes, or colors to be useless if he modifies techniques in the process of his artistic creation. Early drafts in any medium or form of art are looked upon as warm-ups or stimulants for the artists-themselves engaging in a process.

Film-editing provides an especially useful analog between print and non- print media. The film-maker experiments with every possible way to "say" what he wants to express with a camera. He uses variations on camera-angle, duration of shots, juxtaposed sound-pattern-in short, everything from the manipulation of sin- gle frames to the building of an overall unity and rhythm-in order to expand his range of cinematic expression. In film- making it is easy to see the continuity between "drafting" and editing. The initial process generates material that is qualitatively and quantitatively ready for editing. Ernest Lindgren's appraisal clarifies the central position of the editing process in the creation of the final product:

The fundamental psychological justi- fication of editing as a method of rep- resenting the physical world around us lies in the fact that it reproduces this mental process in which one visual image follows another as our attention is drawn to this point and to that in our surroundings. Insofar as the film is photographic and reproduces movement, it can give us a lifelike semblance of what we see; insofar as it employs editing, it can reproduce the manner in

which we usually see it. This explains why the modem film is so much more vivid and interesting and lifelike than the primitive film, which was limited to the artificial, unreal manner of the theater.1

Through editing, the film-maker discov- ered that he could change the meaning of the whole by rearranging, without necessarily altering the content of, an existing sequence.

Dziga Vertov's "kino-eye" technique underlines the importance of assembling and rearranging materials as the film- maker perceives with the camera and then relies for his effects "solely on the choice of the material and the way in which it was ultimately assembled at the editing table."2 Briefly stated, "kino-eye" assumes that the camera is a tool for research in "the endless process of taking creative notes on film."3 After "the endless process of observation with camera in hand," the film-maker must "establish the order, of exposition of what has been shot" by assessing the "thousand possible combinations" and then actually creating in the editing process: "The school of Kino-Eye requires that the cine- thing be built upon 'intervals,' that is, upon a movement between the pieces, the frames; upon the proportions of these pieces between themselves, upon the transitions from one visual impulse to the one following it." Similarly, the writer must understand that the goal of creative editing is the creative artifice of verbal discourse. The student as editor will be helped significantly if he is able to understand such parallels between the job

1The Art of the Film (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 67.

2Lindgren, p. 97. 3Dziga Vertov, "Kinoks-evolution" (Selec-

tions), in Film Makers on Film Making, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 79-105. Geduld collects several excerpts from Vertov's Manifestoes, most of which he wrote between 1922 and 1934.

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of the film-editor and his own prospects as self-editor.

The procedure for applying this method practically in a writing class should be kept simple. It is not necessary to re- hearse the film-editor's tasks at great length to help the student see the analog with the compositional process. It is the editor's job to fix the sequence of film shots, which are rarely taken in the order the finished film reflects. Similarly, the student editor must be reminded at the outset that he need not draft pages in the order he expects to achieve in final copy. Understanding this flexibility in initial drafts enables him to invest less psychic energy in "getting things right" the first time and thereby frees him from a sometimes crippling reluctance to make productive revisions later. The film-editor and the student-as-editor share the jobs of selecting and arranging details, structuring and pacing materials for emphasis, blending sequences together through effective cuts and transitions, and establishing unity and continuity by fixing sequence and pattern and rearranging the parts to enhance the effects of the whole. Thus the earliest stages of the writing process or camera shots as well as the third or fourth revision or splicing are all a part of the-continuous creative activity common to print and celluloid media.

What Lindgren calls the film-maker's reproducing the manner in which one perceives provides further practical sug- gestions about the purpose of a writer's revisions. The student who attempts to communicate what he sees as well as how he sees it to an audience must first be able at an even earlier stage to recreate for himself what he sees and how he sees it. He must, in short, develop all the prewriting and drafting stages necessary before revision is profitable. Like the film-maker, the student writer must explore thoroughly what he sees. He must through words approach his subject from different angles, with varying

intensity, achieving appropriate tone, rhythm, and overall unity. He must- once again like the film-editor-develop techniques for determining how to simul- taneously expand and compress in order to create through the building of patterns. In order to maintain this continuous process, the writer must have a record of his own thinking in a form that captures the shape of that thinking as it developed. An essential question, then, about the analog between film-editing and the revision process lies in parallels between the film-maker's and the writer's tasks prior to their editing and splicing.

When a student feels he is ready to (or is told to) revise an essay, an immediate disjunction between writing (assumed to be creative) and revising (almost always assumed to be merely remedial) is often arresting. Further, an artificial gap between his initial reactions (thoughts, feelings, ideas about what has been assigned and what he has written about what was assigned) and the actual writing and rewriting of his responses restricts his ability to re-examine his thinking in ways that could make revision profitable. But there are practical ways to help the student supply the missing link between these two phases of his education.

To get started on paper, the student needs some way to record as fully as possible the complexity of his own reading response. If he is accustomed to being disillusioned or at least puzzled by the disparity between a good experience he's had in reading an assigned essay and the uninspiring string of common- places he's able to get together on paper or in class discussion, he may like and understand what he reads without hav- ing much to say about it to anyone. Get- ting started in this case means creating a system for recording "gut" responses in all their complexity immediately on the spot so that he can return to his record in all later rethinking and revis-

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ing. When a student is asked to revise an essay, how are we to know whether his blank look means (a) he sees nothing to change, (b) he isn't able to achieve the changes he himself can see the need for, or (c) he had many more complex responses earlier but because he has no record of it as he experienced it, the assignment asks for the impossible task of reconstructing an immensely complex experience with no resources to draw on? Thus, "I read the assignment, but I just can't remember much about it" really means that memory itself unaided cannot recreate his immediate reactions to an assigned reading in a situation that calls as much for recreating the past as it does for creating the present. Drawing upon such a detailed record of his personal reactions, the student-as-editor is later able to similarly prepare a critique of his own finished product through further marginal comments. We all use something like this method when we mark books, make notes, prepare lec- tures, and raise questions that are gen- uinely on our minds. Although we usually appear to have more to say than the students, perhaps we have merely recorded what we think is worthwhile to preserve and the students haven't. Mar- ginal comments also have a further ad- vantage as the student's later impression of his earlier drafts become both edi- torial comment and a further drafting of ideas. Hence, the theoretical and practical links between the processes of drafting and editing are again underscored in specific assignments.

The procedure for all this should also be kept simple. The student should at first work with mimeographed copies of assigned readings (and later mimeographed copies of his own essays) which he can mark-up and then submit to the instructor or pass along to someone else for his reaction. He should merely record his responses to the assigned readings on the dittoed copies in marginal notes, un- derlining, questions, arrows for cross-

references, circling key words and phrases, exclamations of any variety, x's in the margins for emphasis, pictures, doodling, or any shorthand that can help recreate his experience when he will need to have it fresh for later writing and rewriting. Yellow, green, or pink felt-pens blotting out long passages seem to be a current rage. One difficulty is that if the student marks out three- fourths of a page and provides no verbal notations at all, then he has for all practical purposes "notated" nothing. Any sort of unconscious marking is counter- productive and serves only to soothe one's subconscious guilt about uninvolved reading. The student should be reminded of the danger of filling the margins mechanically in order to fool himself into thinking he is "reading."

Developing a system of marginal no- tation and linking that record of personal response to the revision process also help to clarify a time-honored piece of advice that is sound and yet often intim- idating to one not ready to understand all its implications. A student is often told that he is too close to his material and that in revising he must achieve the objectivity associated with distance. Of course this is true, and almost all students can see that it is valuable advice. But too often the advice translates into the assumption that someone else is always needed to provide the objectivity suggested. When, however, the writer himself must provide the distance, he needs more than the maxim that he should let a paper "cool off" by putting it aside for a while and then returning to it with a fresh point of view. For the student in a writing class especially, revision is a paradoxical process of getting more involved in personal responses while he achieves, at the same time, a distance that is often mistakenly associated with non-involvement. This combi- nation is understandably not easy to achieve. But it has been made even more unreachable by our own misunderstood

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emphasis on the connections between "correctness," impersonal criticism, and "objectivity." Just as the impersonality of third person and passive voice is often mistaken by the student for an "objec- tive" stance, so also the importance of "uninvolved" editing can be over-empha- sized. Because some noticeable results are obtained through impersonal or "uninvolved" distancing, it does not follow that the actual needs of students in a writing class are thereby being an- swered. Perhaps the instructor who is working from a distance is learning more than the student who has not yet been "let in on" the editing process. Before a student will be able to revise his material with anything approaching the "un- biased critical eye" called for in an ap- peal to "distancing," he must first learn how to get more rather than less involved with, closer to rather than farther away from, his own developing responses. Again like the film-maker, the student-writer must develop better material to edit. Neither the film-maker nor the writer can afford to see editing as an arbitrary search for pattern. Each must be clear on what he is trying to say and approach editing as a means toward clar- ifying, rather than a wild searching for, what he wishes to communicate.

In the initial stages of revision, it is probably best for the student not to agonize over his first draft. Instead, he should look back to the marginal comments in which he has recorded his thinking in the first place. He should then rethink his own reactions and re- formulate the issues he is considering. Only after such re-visioning of his thinking should he write out again' his personal reactions-this time in response to both the assigned reading and his own earlier record of his reactions. In this process, the student sees himself revising his own responses, not in order to bring them into accord with what someone else thinks (though he will naturally consider such things) but rather in order to shape

and reshape his writing according to his own developing standards and in line with what his own more involved, complex, and clearly stated responses call for.

We have all experienced the horror of looking back some years later to something our earlier and less enlightened self had composed and then had cut loose. After recovering from the shock, we hopefully come to see our earlier responses as valuable stages on the way to where we are now. Had we not been what we were then, we could not be what we are now; the various starts and stops were all activities necessary to "get through." So, too, with revision. While the student is not-in a work-in-progress for a class-chronologically as far away from his earliest responses, living through and then preserving in verbal form his earliest responses may have deepened, modified, and even changed significantly his thinking and perception.

It makes sense, then, for each writer to develop his own effective and easily repeatable ways to keep preliminary materials together and in an order he can understand. Drawing upon his own as well as his instructor's marginal comments, the student will have collected far more than he can ever use each time he sets out to rewrite a paper. He is then in the position of the film-maker or the photographer who is about to edit his shots. It is crucial for him to remember at this point that discarded writing is not useless effort. The writer must ultimately look upon his material as a mass of prized possessions ready to be packed for moving. If, when packing, he con- cludes that it is more expensive to move something than it is really worth to him, he shouldn't move it just because it's his and he won't let loose. If the price for moving first drafts into final copy is the forfeiture of later complexity that goes undeveloped, the earlier material must be acknowledged for what it was worth and left behind.

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The physical disposition of early drafts also helps establish the students sense of editing as a continuous process. Lik- ening revision to the making of a collage is far from stretching comparison. If re- ordering the parts of early drafts means endless rewriting and recopying, the student probably won't do it-no matter how sound he feels it might be to do so. Any means that can lessen the physical busy-work of revision should become au- tomatic to the writer. Such well-known devices include writing on every other line so that revisions can be made between the lines rather than in a whole new copy; writing on one side of a page only so a writer can cut out materials or tape new passages onto a page without sacrificing copy on a second side; cutting and pasting for patch-work rather than recopying at any point possible; using photo-copy machines to copy quotations from sources. Any technique that helps the student to see writing as an ongoing process, as artifice, as the putting together of materials in various stages to achieve meaningful wholes, will help him to see that the editor is a creative artist rather than a mere "corrector." The keeping of a daily journal or notebook of ideas not only provides a repository of sources but also helps fix a continuity between note-taking, successive drafts, and creative revision. Composing on a roll of paper that approximates the continuity of the movie reel may allow the student to see larger patterns. Looking at the relationships between the parts of a draft in the perspective provided by a movie-like manuscript may enable the student to see more clearly the similari- ties between editing prose and splicing film as two related means of building structure inductively. Though writing on a roll of paper rather than on separate sheets smacks of gimmickry, as a rein- forcer of continuity, it may break down the often rigid barriers imposed by the

student's aiming toward such goals as the number of pages or word-counts. The point is that there's too much substan- tive work in revising to waste time on busy work that advances the final product no more than what could be accom- plished by short-cuts. Again a word of warning is necessary. The same psychological principles that make these short- cuts sound practice can, when carried to extremes, bring about the writer's undo- ing. The student who uses "patchwork" editing solely to save old, readily available material that should be discarded or who fills a page with material pro- duced by a hyperactive copy-machine will find himself aborting the process.

The paradox posed by instructors' rhapsodizing about revision and students' citing examples of successful writ- ers who write well seemingly without revision is a problem that cannot easily be explained away. A student may sug- gest, for example, that professional writ- ers must meet deadlines and therefore generally have little time for extensive revisions. They simply must get their writing done on first-copy. The student may cite the example of Samuel Johnson, who fed copy for his Rambler essays page by page to the printer's boy waiting at the door. And he might follow with a simple request: "Why don't we learn how to write first-copy prose and bypass all the extra time required by this revision business?" At this point we ought to simply state that writing polished, first-copy prose with no need for revision is the goal of learning how to revise. We should also encourage the student by re- minding him that as he becomes increas- ingly proficient in various stages of revision, he will progressively have less and less need for more and more of the activities he has mastered.

Central Michigan University Mount Pleasant

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Documents

Film-Editing and the Revision Process: Student as Self-Editor