Does Your Revision Process Need More Taylor Swift?

I needed to shave twenty thousand words from my second book.

The memoir took me four years to write and another two to revise, including the six-month word cull. Once I was finished, I thought I’d achieved a balance of concision and emotion—notoriously difficult to strike. I hadn’t been sure I could do it, so the relief when I proved myself wrong was palpable. Then Taylor Swift dropped Folklore. I listened to “the 1,” and six years of work felt suddenly pointless in the best way.

In three and a half minutes, Swift managed to nail all the best elements of my 85,000-word book: the wistful nostalgia; the feeling that the person you once knew best in the world is a stranger now; the lingering wish that it would have worked out, even after your life has carried on and developed without the person; and, perhaps most of all, the constant bargaining, that struggle between moving on and reaching back to the past even though it hurts you. I’d expected Folklore to feel meaningful, to speak to me the way so much of Swift’s music has in the past. But I never could have anticipated how the ruinous brevity of “the 1” would cast a new light on my own writing.

I came late to T-Swift fandom. I’d always enjoyed her songs on the radio (back when I used to listen to it, before podcasts and playlists limited my exposure to new music), but I’d never gone so far as to purchase an album until 1989 came out. My bossiest friend, a die-hard Swifty, pestered me for days about the songs on that album: Which one did I like best? Did I get that “Style” was about Harry Styles? Didn’t I just love the ironic tone of “Blank Space”? I grew tired of searching the songs on YouTube every time she texted me, so I bought the album on iTunes.

Which was how I discovered that Taylor Swift is a modern poet. For all her various contrived public personas and her possibly manufactured cult following, Swift can write. Her music is catchy, sure, and her voice is nice, but the thing that keeps me coming back to her work is the lyrics.

Her fearless lack of concern for giving listeners the full picture is exactly what lets us in.

The summer before 1989 came out, in 2014, I was going through a breakup that felt more like the end of my adult life. We’d been together for seven years, engaged for a few months, when he began to lie and pick fights and behave like someone I had never met. I found out in June that he’d cheated in March, and my past, present, and future all crumbled at once.

By the time the album dropped in October, I’d been in therapy for a year and three months, and I was finally able to listen to breakup songs for healing purposes: “All You Had to Do Was Stay” played on repeat on my laptop that entire winter, as I raged at and pleaded with and, in my weaker moments, tried to find my way back to my not-quite-ex.

I’d just begun writing a book about my experience. About the breakup, yes, but also the therapy it drove me to and the journey that therapy set me on—to a new version of adulthood. I wanted to write the memoir I needed to read, to address all the nuances of heartbreak and post-traumatic growth, the way a person can know, logically, that a breakup is for the best while still feeling an intense longing for its reversal.

And there I go again, writing a few hundred words about it when I could just quote the chorus of “the 1,” a detailed yet somehow light-toned lament hung around the core of these two lines:

And if my wishes came trueIt would’ve been you

Swift packs years into the chorus. Each line carries an absurdly deep feeling, despite the language being casual, almost shoulder-shrugging: the grieving of something special; the ease and joy of young love; the sad acknowledgment that we often don’t get what we want; the loss of a dreamed future; the understanding that this rumination is unhealthy (but also that it’s irresistible); the wistful repetition of the dream; and, finally, the reinforcement that the relationship had the potential to be “the one.”

And that’s just the chorus! Every other line of the song does the work of either establishing or deepening the premise. The opening lines of the first verse demonstrate the unfamiliar distance between the speaker and her ex, as she imagines filling him in on her daily life—details he’d surely know if they were still lovers, or even friends—and expresses the way he haunts her peripheral vision:

I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though

The second verse is similar: The speaker imagines what her ex is up to now, “adventures” he might be enjoying, women he might be sleeping with. That verse ends with the line “You know the greatest loves of all time are over now”—which is just brutal.

Then the chorus repeats, with new weight to its deceptively flip language now that we know what they had was more than just a casual fling—they were among the “greatest loves of all time.” The way Swift comes at this intensity sideways, referencing pennies thrown in fountains and celebrations with chosen family, is brilliant because it makes space for the listener to feel her own pain, rather than smothering her with overwhelming descriptions of the speaker’s.

As a detail-heavy writer with a drive to explain my emotions to the point of giving myself plausible deniability—if someone misunderstands me, it couldn’t possibly be because I didn’t explain myself clearly or often enough—I envy the breezy confidence of the speaker in “the 1.” Her fearless lack of concern for giving listeners the full picture is exactly what lets us in.

And then there’s the bridge, which punches me in the gut every time I listen to the song (including now, as I draft this). With a juddering, thrice-repeated “I” at the beginning, Swift throws us right into the struggle—that desperation to ask, over and over again, whether one change in the circumstances of their relationship might have saved them from its demise.

That question is the linchpin of my own book and, I’d wager, of most long-term heartbreaks. Like Swift’s speaker, those of us who’ve lost great loves come back to this question again and again. Even if we manage to “resist” asking it aloud, it’s pressing against the insides of our skulls so hard we have to “persist” to keep it inside. What if we’d checked their phone and caught them before the Rubicon was crossed? What if we’d skipped that one happy hour with friends and spent the evening pressing our partner to open up instead? What if we’d never had kids, or had been married already, or had put our foot down about that “friend” we never trusted, or had moved to a different city, or, or, or . . . ?

The questions plague us incessantly, but they’ll never be answered, because the truth is that we never controlled these situations in the first place. The core reality of a relationship is that it involves (at least) two unique individuals, and no matter how close they get, one can never fully understand or predict the other.

I’ve never been great at literary analysis, so the fact that I can get this much out of what is essentially a six-stanza poem with three mostly repeated stanzas is a credit to how much clarity and storytelling Swift has packed into “the 1.” Luckily for me, different literary forms call for different amounts of detail and narrative, so this needn’t be the literary version of “you have the same number of hours in the day as Beyoncé.”

I don’t think I need to scrap my book altogether just because Swift has covered so much of the emotional subject matter in a more concise form. But there are lessons to be found for writers of all genres in songs like this one—on brevity, on trusting our readers/listeners, and on trusting ourselves to get the point across without writing it to death. For my part, the culling mindset has been easier to get into if I just call up “the 1” for reassurance that my readers are unlikely to need a deep-dive explanation of every feeling. After all, most of us read memoir and personal essays to see reflections of (and to better understand) elements of ourselves—which means readers will likely be meeting me halfway where heartbreak and emotional confusion are concerned. Plus, it’s easier to add more depth when it’s requested than it is to cut darlings you’ve become too attached to over six years of writing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another revision to do.

• 0