Constructing and Deconstructing

photo by Lightning Lee
(Maybe he gets all the words right the first time...)

      
       I'm working on a piece that needs lot of tearing apart (the crappy parts) and  a great deal of building up (the weaker and the fairly-decent parts).

      One of the "Donalds" (Graves or Murray, I can remember which) said that writing is "as much deconstruction as construction." He claims that we spend as much time scratching out and deleting as we do actually writing.  

      What is it about the revising process that you love? Or perhaps it's a relationship filled with pure venom? In that case, what is it about revising that you hate?

I'm Part of a Deconstruction Crew

        One of the Donalds (Murray or Graves) wrote that, "Writing is as much deconstruction as it is construction."  I haven't bothered to find the book and page where I originally found it a decade or so ago, so it's not an exact quote, but it made a powerful impact on me.

photo by chigmaroff

       I used to love to have hard copies of pieces, and each new draft would be stapled to the top of the stack.  That way, I could look through the various drafts and see the progress--the scratched out part here, the rearranged part there, and so on.  Now, when my piece is on my laptop/flashdrive (after it's handwritten--I rarely begin a fresh piece via a keyboard), I make changes that result in my "progress" becoming invisible.  With a click of a mouse or a few keystrokes, whole paragraphs or pages can be moved around; the original arrangement falls back and disappears out of sight.

        What tips about the "deconstruction" phase do you have?  What helpful tidbits can you offer up when it comes time to revise?  Inquiring minds want to know...