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Layering: A Structured Approach to Revision Interview with Chaitali Sen
by Writing Workshops Staff
A week ago
Writing is, in many ways, a leap into the unknown—a furious scramble to make sense of elusive ideas, half-formed scenes, and characters who seem to shift under the pen. Yet somewhere between that exhilarating first draft and the final flourish lies the murky space of revision, that often-daunting, the often-exhilarating process of polishing raw material until it can truly sparkle.
It’s in this fertile and sometimes intimidating creative terrain that Chaitali Sen thrives. Sen, the author of the novel The Pathless Sky and the acclaimed short-story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven, has made a life out of teasing clarity from chaos, shaping narratives through a method that she calls “layering.”
In her forthcoming workshop—Layering: A Structured Approach to Revision, hosted on Zoom over six weeks—Sen offers her students a unique opportunity to wrestle with (and ultimately befriend) the messy yet magical process of reworking a draft. A graduate of the Hunter College MFA program and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Houston, Sen brings both a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s warmth to her teaching, guiding emerging writers to see what a manuscript truly needs to thrive. Rather than treating revision as a single juggernaut to be tackled head-on, her technique teaches writers how to compartmentalize—and conquer—potential pitfalls, from plot inconsistencies to underdeveloped settings and pacing snafus.
Yet what sets Sen’s workshop apart is more than just its methodical approach. It’s the promise of transformation. In a literary landscape prone to celebrating finished products, Sen revels in the middle spaces—those “a-ha” moments, as she calls them, when a story finally finds its voice. Her workshop offers companionship and structure for authors, fiction and memoirists alike, who might find themselves staring at pages of scribbled notes or unsatisfactory prose, unsure how to unearth the hidden gem beneath.
As she prepares to welcome a new cohort of students, we sat down with Sen to discuss her passion for revision, the origins of her layering approach, and what inspires her to keep shaping words into vibrant, resonant narratives. The conversation that follows, much like her class, promises to shed light on the hidden mechanisms of rewriting—and to remind us all that a good revision is often the gateway to a great story.
Writing Workshops: You’ve described revision as the most rewarding part of the writing process, but also the most overwhelming. Can you walk us through the emotional rollercoaster that writers often experience in that messy middle stage, and how a “layering” approach can help them keep moving forward?
Chaitali Sen: The messy middle stage is almost inevitable. This is the point where a writer has been with the story for a while, and might be losing some stamina or interest. Often we start throwing in all kinds of twists just to keep things interesting. Or we haven’t quite gotten the story past the beginning and nothing important is happening. I say work through all that in the first draft. Get to an ending. Once you have a beginning, middle, and end, you have material to revise and an idea of how you want to or don’t want to shape your project.
WW: The term ‘layering’ suggests a measured, deliberate process. How did you discover or develop this particular method of focusing on one issue at a time, and what was the turning point in your own writing life that convinced you this strategy was essential?
CS: A page by page, line by line revision process did not work for me. I ended up with nice-sounding paragraphs but a story that didn’t really hold together. I had to figure out a way to go from the biggest problems to the smallest. The metaphor of layering made sense to me because I could see the story has having a thematic layer, a story layer, and a texture layer. You could also look at it as layers of problems to chip away at. Is there a big ugly crust on this thing that’s the first order of problems you have to solve? Revision is really just a process of identifying problems and then going to work on solving them. The word “problem” is scary, but it doesn’t have to be.
WW: Both memoir and fiction writers will be in your workshop. How do you see memoir writing benefiting from techniques traditionally associated with fiction, and vice versa? Are there any craft elements—like characterization or setting—that unexpectedly apply to both?
CS: Both of these are narrative forms. Readers of both want a good story. They both need to revolve around one or two themes, they both needs a narrative structure, they both require a combination of scene and summary, and they both have elements such as voice, character, setting, and so on. They both also have plots, although the plots may be driven by different motivations, rules, and constraints.
WW: Writers sometimes struggle to see their own work objectively, especially if it’s deeply personal. What are some practical tactics for creating the distance needed to revise, and how do you know when you’ve achieved that critical level of objectivity?
CS: I am a big fan of putting something in a “drawer” for a while. It could be a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Outlining what you actually wrote, after you have a draft, forces you to look objectively at what you included (or didn’t include) in your draft. I don’t think reading your manuscript as if you’re someone else works, but you can record what you did and note your feelings about it.
WW: Revision often requires letting go of favorite scenes or cherished lines that don’t serve the overall piece. How do you advise students to navigate this process of ‘creative destruction’ without losing confidence or the essence of their voice?
CS: Letting go of a favorite scene or line should be in service of the story and what it’s about. I never tell students to delete anything. Put it in a different file. Sometimes that scene belongs in some form in another story. There is no reason to lose confidence even if you have to replace or cut a lot of scenes. If your aim is to tell the best story possible, and you’re certain cutting something you love will help, that in itself should be your confidence booster.
WW: In the workshop, you’ve mentioned celebrating “a-ha” moments. Can you share a story—either from your own work or from a student’s experience—where a pivotal breakthrough reshaped the direction of a manuscript?
CS: In the title story of my collection A New Race of Men from Heaven, I could hear the voice of the narrator clearly, so I had a beginning that never changed through the multiple drafts. But I wrote a lot of aimless drafts because I couldn’t figure out what the heart of the story was. One day I happened to stumble upon something as I was doing research. It was a blog post about one of the paintings at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, England, which is mentioned in my story. The writer of the blog translated (or perhaps mistranslated) the title of the painting as “A New Race of Men from Heaven,” and suddenly I had something that held my story together thematically and pointed to its ending.
WW: Writers are usually told to “keep going” through the difficult stages of drafting and revising. But is there ever a point when stepping away from a project is the right call? How do you recognize when it’s time to move on, either temporarily or permanently?
CS: This is a complicated question. The short answer is yes, sometimes it’s the right call to walk away from something. Whether that should be temporarily or permanently only you can decide. Sometimes life circumstances decide these things for us, and hopefully there will be a time when you can revisit that piece and see if it sparks something. But if you’re just struggling with a piece of writing and you’ve hit a wall, I think you have to ask yourself, “What if I walk away from this?” What will that mean for you? What will the consequences be and how do you feel about those consequences? I always think if there is some glimmer of hope, keep going.
So, what are you waiting for? Avoid the waitlist and sign up for Layering: A Structured Approach to Revision with Chaitali Sen!
Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky (Europa Editions, 2015) and short stories and essays which have appeared in Boulevard, Colorado Review, Ecotone, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, Electric Literature, Shenandoah, and other publications. Her Kirkus-starred story collection, A New Race of Men from Heaven, was selected by Danielle Evans as the winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and was published Sarabande Books. A graduate of the Hunter College MFA in Fiction, she is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Houston, where she is the recipient of the Inprint J.A. and Isabel M. Elkins Foundation Fellowship and a graduate teaching fellowship.
