Why We Resist Revision

Blame the brain's default settings

Photo by Devin H on Unsplash

Do you struggle to take out a line—or twenty?—from a poem that needs trimming? Here’s why. 

According to cognitive neuroscience, we are hardwired to prefer adding (new solutions to problems, new connections, more lines of poetry) over subtracting. I know this to be true in my own writing practice, so my ears perked up listening to the recent Hidden Brain podcast episode Do Less. In it host Shankar Vedantam discusses the power of subtraction and how we struggle with our “add more!” default setting.  

The gist? We like to collect things. We like to elaborate. We really, really don’t want to pare anything down, despite all of the wonderful Zen sayings—oh, wait, we collect those, too.

According to studies reported in Nature:

“… people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load.”

There aren’t any studies that suggest poets are more open to subtraction than the general population, but I suspect that might be true. Poetry tends to attract those of us for whom the world is “too much.” In part we are drawn to poetry because it helps us contain the overwhelming facts of living. But we’re simultaneously curious about everything. We love to make lots of wild, associative leaps. Therein lies the rub.

How often do you resist taking out lines and words, even when they are pointed out to be superfluous or incongruous? I get it. That line or word took energy to go from brain to page, to get expressed in a certain way. Why would you willingly destroy it? It’s natural to resist.

Shake it up

It often takes a shake-up for us to see the necessity of removing something from a poem.

Not unlike this example (also from Hidden Brain) of the Embarcadero highway in San Francisco. It was ugly, it blocked city views, and it wasn’t efficiently getting people where they needed to go. For years, the city tried to restructure it but efforts were always met with resistance. No one wanted to make a drastic change—until the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake took down similar highway sections in nearby cities. People immediately recognized the necessity of subtraction.

That’s what workshops are—earthquakes, shakeups. Maybe, knowing this, we can all appreciate the earthquakes a little bit more.  

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