Introducing Revisionary

A Q&A series where artists talk about revising, redoing, and how to make what you create even better

Next week, I’ll be publishing the first issue of a new Q&A series I’m calling Revisionary. Every two weeks you’ll get a new interview with someone in a creative field talking about how they approach revision and the process of making their work better.

If you’re already subscribed to A Little Detour, you’ll get the first one next week. If not, click the little button below to subscribe. These interviews will always be free and sharable upon publication. After a month, they’ll go behind a paywall.

Don’t miss out! There are some truly great interviews in the pipeline. All have had such good advice no matter what field you’re in. A few of them have made me cry. Revision is scary (and sometimes exhausting) but also vital to improving whatever it is you do. I’ve been working on Revisionary for over a month and it’s already changed the way I approach revision in my own work.

I thought it was only fair to put myself in the hot seat. Here’s a self-interview about the series to kick things off.

Tove Danovich: Let’s get this one out of the way. How do you pronounce your name?

Tove Danovich: The last name is pretty much what it sounds like. My first name rhymes with “Nova”. The “e” at the end makes an “a” sound.

TD: Why start an interview series about revision?

TD: I’ve been thinking about doing an interview series for a long time but I knew I didn’t just want to interview writers. Maybe it’s a product of going to art school but I miss talking to people from other disciplines. We’re all trying to make something that matters but the way we approach it, the tools we have to work with, all of that is a little bit different and shapes the way we look at process and the world.

TD: Ok but why revision specifically?

TD: I like an interview series where everyone is asked the same questions. As a reader or listener, I think having an expectation and seeing it fulfilled is satisfying. The podcast Normal Gossip asks every guest what their relationship with gossip is. On Ologies, Alie Ward always ends the interview by asking guests what one thing is they love and hate about what they do. In

Jane Ratcliffe

’s Beyond Questionnaire, she asks every guest to talk about a special relationship they’ve had with an animal and I love so much I always scroll down to read it first.

Sorry, I’m going long here. But the point is that I wanted to talk to a lot of different people but I wanted to be able to ask them the same group of questions and have it be relevant to what they did. It took a long time to come up with that! One day, the writer Katie Cusumano, a friend of mine, was telling me she’s teaching a class on revision and I literally felt the lightbulb go off over my head. Here was something everyone could speak to that I’d be really interested in talking about! It's not just an art thing either but has lessons that I think apply to how we approach revision in our selves and life.

TD: How did you decide what questions to ask?

TD: As you’ll see, the questions are fairly general and open ended. The format I wound up going with is to have a short list of questions everyone gets and ask follow up questions as the conversation develops. Still, I’m used to interviewing people as sources for reported articles which is different from a Q&A. I spent a few hours (no joke) coming up with a list of questions that would hopefully get people to talk about revision from a few different perspectives.

TD: It took you a few hours to come up with a few questions?

TD: Literally my final list is seven questions long. But yes! A few hours of work over the course of a few days. And I actually had to remove or revise a few of my questions after the first interview.

TD: Did you purposefully put in bad questions so you could revise them for your interview series about revision?

TD: My brain is too tired to come up with something like that. I asked a couple questions in my first interview and felt, as I was asking them, that they fell a little flat. But my interviewee got excited talking about something else and I realized following her lead might be a better approach for future conversations.

TD: Are you just going to keep changing the questions as you go then? I thought this was “everyone gets the same questions”.

TD: Maybe! It’s always delightful if things go perfectly the first time. I wish all my work came out as the best possible version of itself on the first draft but that’s not how it works. It would be silly to stick with something that could be improved upon just because I said I would.

TD: How did you decide who to interview?

TD: I started making a list of people I knew—some peripherally and others who are close friends—and immediately the list was 50 people long. Honestly, a great sign! There are so many more people I want to talk to than I could ever get through.

One thing that’s nice with beginning something like this with people I know is that it’s easier to make the initial ask. (I know they like me enough to give me some grace if/when things go wrong.) I also know a little bit about their work already which means less prep time while I’m also doing a lot of behind the scenes work to make this series (hopefully) successful.

But there are incredible people I don’t know. And while I love getting a look inside the thought process of “big names” I don’t want to only talk to the same people everyone else is talking to.

I’m a writer and I know many writers—some who are household names and others doing excellent work who aren’t (yet). But I don’t know as many of those people in science or art or music or dance or theater or crafting etc etc because I don’t live in those worlds!

TD: If you want to talk to people in different fields but don’t know people to reach out to who aren’t writers that, uh, sounds like kind of an issue?

TD: Thanks for the vote of confidence. This is a blind spot of mine that I am aware of and taking steps to fix. Frankly, I have some names to draw from for the first few months of this series but am relying on you to help me out.

If you’d be interested in being interviewed, please fill out this short form and let me know about you and your work!

Also, if you have a suggestion for someone I should reach out to, please leave their name (and a link to their work so I can find them) in the comments.

This Q&A has been revised multiple times.

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