AAccording to a friend of mine, when I talk about feeling embarrassed, ashamed or misunderstood, my hands become claws and I run them across my face with exaggerated anguish. I didn’t realize I had done this, but as soon as she said it, I knew it was true.

While performing this movement, we identified another: winding the rope, throwing too far, at breakneck speed. Both come up often when I talk about my writing – at the risk of sharing words that I might regret.

If I want to write about what I think, what I really think, this is a risk that I must accept. Sometimes my thoughts will go against the grain, turn out to be unpopular, do me feel unpopular. And sometimes I come back to an opinion I expressed and realize that it has changed. I’m going to want to withdraw it.

These gestures occurred to me when I heard that a famous American writer had bought back the rights to his first two books – for about 10 times what he was paid to write them – so that he could revise and re-edit them. In the process, he cut some testing altogether. I wondered why.

My first thought was that what he said then did not correspond to popular opinion today. But in an interview with the New York Times, Kiese Laymon seemed less concerned with how these essays might now be viewed than with how his own perceptions had changed since they were written.

Laymon said he always revised his work and himself. He sees revision as an ongoing commitment to honesty; a perpetual process of “evaluation” linked to the very act of living. He said the reason he deleted essays from his book was because he couldn’t “stand by” them anymore.

He also said that the times he was most “ethical” and “tender”, whether in a work of art or in a relationship, had been the times he looked back with the will to see. if some sort of “wrong” had been done.

Thinking like this can come at a price. There is a risk that we will see something that we don’t want to see, in our words or in ourselves, that calls for change. We cannot go back and deny what was said, but if we see that we were wrong, and this is important, we can be the first to speak.

The way Laymon talks about revision reminds me of how George Saunders talks about reformulating news. In his latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders discusses the power of careful, sentence-by-sentence revision in a way that makes editing a rough sound more important than writing a song. a sound.

A work of art “must surprise its audience, which it can only do if it has legitimately surprised its creator,” he says. And, through repeated rephrasing, it just might.

Like Laymon, Saunders goes further: the unintended effect of trying, “as you wish, over and over,” to make better sentences, could even be called “moral-ethical.”

Saunders illustrates his point by comparing the phrase “Bob was an asshole” with a phrase that instead describes Bob’s behavior as an asshole and explains why. The person who wrote the revised phrase “feels like a better guy, sort of” than the person who wrote “Bob was an asshole,” he says.

“I find it happens all the time. I like the person I am in my stories better than the real me. This person is smarter, more spiritual, more patient, funnier – his view of the world is wiser. “

I am not a famous writer. Most of the time, I relay the opinions of others, not my own. But I also wrote the strange freelance article. Through rephrasing and revising, I refine my words – and my thoughts – until I can “stick” to an argument.

Rejection is disheartening, but acceptance is frightening. Having a piece purchased and published means it no longer belongs to me. A line, a word, will it be misinterpreted? Did I miss or misunderstand an essential point? Will I ever scratch my face and pull an imaginary rope in vain?

Indeed, I could. But if we let court approval and avoid contempt dictate our words, no one wins. If we dare not speak with honesty – to be vulnerable, to take risks – the public square will indeed be a gloomy place.

Motives matter. Sometimes I’m tempted to revise for the wrong reasons – not out of a desire to write better or more honestly, but out of a desire to please, to play it safe. This is not an “honest assessment”, it is cowardice.

A review that denies the past is too.

Writer or not, it concerns you: technology makes us all authors, and who has never wanted to retrieve, revise, an e-mail, a text or a message?

If we are human, we will make mistakes. There should be no shame in making a confession, in changing your stance, if a fault line has been exposed – a nuance understood, a truth revealed. But sometimes we act like we do.

One thing is certain: we will never have all the answers. It is a fact that we very easily forget; a fact that means paying attention to different ways of thinking is something we should cultivate, not fear. We have so much to learn; we will always have so much to learn.

We should expect to make mistakes. We should be willing to be honest when we see we are wrong, and when others do, we should be willing to respond with grace.