Revision is Emotional “Revision! Whatever that is.” And thus Gotham’s own Arlaina Tibensky kicked off our Fiction Writing Conference a couple of weeks ago, with a panel on strategies for revising. Which was perfect, because by asking, “What even is this?” Arlaina freed the other writers in the room to come back with an unexpected answer. Revision is… emotional. “The first thing is accepting that even though you’ve been working on your book, and you think you’ve finished it, it’s really not your book yet,” said Kate Fagan, sportswriter and author of the novel The Three Lives of Cate Kay . “You’ve got to mourn that.” When she first sends a book to her editor, Fagan—who has also published two nonfiction books and is working on her next novel—indulges the fantasy that the draft is perfect, or nearly so. When her editor instead responds with notes, Fagan takes two days to mourn, “the loss that I didn’t deliver the perfect bo...