How Meditation Can Help With Your Writing Revision

Revising your own work is a complex process that deserves a systematic approach. The very first step can be as simple as taking a breath.

One thing I like to emphasize when I teach revision is that writing is a physical act.

If we want our stories and memoirs to speak to the universal, we must look outside the bounds of our own experience, even beyond the current limits of our imaginations, and start thinking outside the box.

One way to make that happen is to get up out of your chair. Go on a walk, a run, a bike ride. Pace the room. Talk to ourselves — Yes, of course writers talk to themselves! We must! — sing to ourselves; you name it. Physically, we can leave the spaces where we wrote our early drafts and move our bodies, working in new environments and with new movements in order to jump-start revision.

We can also inquire about the internal landscapes of our own minds. Explicitly understanding our creative processes by tracking how we decide and why we decide, is one of the most important, yet invisible, things we do. Something starts — a jolt through the body, an image in the mind’s eye, a sense memory triggered — and…