Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.
– Red Smith
Underwood Five Typewriter
When I was in college, a professor I respected said that one of the best ways to demystify writing is to write like people you admire. Specifically, to find passages that you love, and try to revise them in your own words. This exercise proved invaluable. It allowed me to walk in their literary footsteps, shedding light on why they chose — or avoided — certain words, punctuation, and syntax.
With this in mind, I recently wondered whether you can crowdsource writing, specifically, revising.
I posted a task through CrowdFlower that asked the crowd to rewrite four famous quotations, pithily, while preserving their meaning.
In one evening, I was able to get 20 revisions of each quotation from people across the country. I won’t summarize them all here, but I will pull a few highlights.
Original Quotation 1 (from Macbeth, William Shakespeare):
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time;/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/ Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing.
Revision 1:
Time marches on, and everyone dies; life is meaningless.
– Hatboro, PA
Life creeps along and ends suddenly like the end of a bad play. The play is dramatic and had poor acting, and has no point or moral in the end.
–Salt Lake City, UT
Original Quotation 2 (from “The Leviathan,” Thomas Hobbes):
No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Revision 2:
The life of a man on his own is barbaric and degrading.
– East Aurora, NY
No art, letters or society. Worst of all, living in fear of being alone, poor and short.
– Arlington, TX
Life is all but a mere scam.
–Overland Park, KS
Original Quotation 3 (“First Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln):
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Revision 3:
We’re fools for fighting each other. We should co-operate, and let our example bring everyone together.
– Plattsburgh, NY
We must be friends, we should now forget each other. Our memories will always stay through our rough times and good times.
– Tallahassee, FL
Original Quotation 4 (from “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg):
“They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.”
Revision 4:
Your reputation follows you and it is a bad one, makeup and lust.
– Iola, WI
This city isn’t a nice place, it’s full of hookers.
– Milledgeville, GA
The full data is available here.
What’s your opinion? Can the revision process be crowdsourced?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
GFN
V. interesting. I make my (meager) living as a novelist, and stumbled across your blog. The idea of crowdsourcing what is perhaps the most vital step of writing fiction is bizarre and counter-intuitive and fascinating.
A more-literary-than-I friend of mine loves experimental novels, and I wonder what he’d make of crowdsourcing. Collaborative fiction tends to be awful, but I know there are various possible mechanisms that might allow the crowd to evaluate output along the way. I dunno. Interesting. The paraphrases aren’t horrible; a few of them are even good.
I don’t think revision can be crowdsourced–it relies too much on context–but certainly -something- can be. Hm.
Josh Eveleth
Thank you for the reply. It’s definitely a space that’s worth exploring. I agree that some of the paraphrases were quite good. I’ll be keen to see what other projects come up.
J. M. Zambelli
Most people first encounter the deconstruction of poetry and prose in high school or English Lit 101. Most of the class won’t get it and a few will distill it to perfection. But the exercise is to aid understanding not with the thought that the original needs improvement. The art of language is lost in the process of reduction and results in a disposable Tweet.
Your examples play this out in an interesting way. It is more like a game of telephone than a translation of the original meaning. There is always a market for aggregated literature. As far as whether the process improves the original text — only if the text was written by a writer who is not as smart as the average person. Cliff Notes come to mind.
Maybe you could post a poorly written passage and see if anyone can make sense of it.