Replay: Andre Dubus III shares Five Things He's Learned about the Absolute Necessity of Revision
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“All my adult life I’ve written both fiction and creative non-fiction. As the author of a memoir, five novels, a collection of personal essays, two short story collections and a third forthcoming – if I’ve learned anything over the course of my writing life, I’ve learned this: the writing is larger than the writer, and my time at the desk tends to go far better not when I set out to say something, but when I set out to discover what needs to be said, dramatized, and illuminated.”
– Andre Dubus III, Five Things I’ve Learned about the Absolute Necessity of Revision
Last week, award-winning writer and teacher Andre Dubus III joined Five Things I've Learned to share all he’s learned about writing, revision, and the glorious challenge of bringing your work to its fullest fruition.
In Five Things I’ve Learned about The Absolute Necessity of Revision, Andre invites writers into the long, often humbling process of discovery that happens not in the first draft, but in the careful, patient work that follows it.
Drawing on a lifetime spent writing both fiction and creative nonfiction, Andre reframes revision as the moment when real intelligence enters the room. Writing, he explains, begins in instinct and dream, but revision requires writers to step back, examine the work with clarity, and listen closely to what the story itself is asking to become. Through insights from writers like Richard Bausch, Stuart Dybek, George Saunders, and Vivian Gornick, the class situates revision not as correction or cleanup, but as a generative, creative act—one that allows a piece to grow into its fullest, most honest form.
About Andre: Andre’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors Choice”.
His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and his novel, House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His 2013 novella collection, Dirty Love, was listed as a “Notable Book” by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and was named a “New York Times Editors’ Choice” and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013.” His 2018 novel, Gone So Long, was named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and “The Best Books of 2018, Top 100,” Amazon. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was one of Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2023, Top 100”. His acclaimed collection of personal essays, Ghost Dog: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories, (Godine, 2023.) The Collector, a novella and five stories, is forthcoming in January 2027.
Andre has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
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