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I brought an essay to my writer's group for a critique, and they told me, "Go north, young woman (I live in New Hampshire), and rewrite."

I did, expanding the things they liked, removing those they didn't. I brought it back with great hope.

They did not like the second draft any more than the first, probably because it was not any better. It was different, not better. I asked for help. They asked why I wrote the essay and gently pointed out that none of those reasons came out in my piece. I took copious notes, went home, and wrote a third draft.

I let it rest for a week, re-read, and it still needed work. Being determined to bring a good essay back to the group, I used an exercise from What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter, to revise it. I cut the essay into sentence-long strips, rearranged them, but that did not help. Then I threw away every lifeless, poorly written, nor non-pertinent sentence. At the end of this exercise, I had reduced my 500-word essay to 27 words. Was that what revision was supposed to be?

I decided to find out. I called Barbara Beckwith. She told me what novelist Gish Jen said at the union's annual Writers Life series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Ask for rewriting tips, Jen said she looks back at her work and asks: Where is my conflict? Where is the voice flagging? Where does the story really start? It may really start on page 70, not page 1. If I'm honest, I can see the problems in my own work.

I can see the problems in my work, too -- I'm just not skilled at fixing them. So I called Edith Pearlman, a highly skilled writer, well-versed in the essay and in fiction. Here's how she describes the rewriting process. " I write a first draft. I don't take a tremendous amount of care with it. Once it's done, I review each sentence, making them as adjective and adverb free as possible I check to see that the sentences are of different lengths. I examine each sentence to make sure that I'm using metaphoric verbs and figures of speech. Then I type it again."

"How may times to do you do that"? "Ten times." Ten times?" I asked. "Yes. Somebody once said (I'm not sure who it was) 'Murder your darlings. That's good advice. Anything you fall in love with in your prose is probably lousy and should be excised.'"

I decided to take another look at my original essay. When I discovered was that Edith was right -- the words that I was so attached to in the first draft were the ones that my fellow essayist exits.

The darlings of my second draft got bumped off in the third. The sentences left were the ones that everyone thought were outstanding, and they passed the Anne Bernays/Pamela Painter clip test.

I am re-writing again, using those 27 words as the focal point of the essay. Edith claims she never considers a piece revised until she is revising form the grave.

I'm starting to understand what she meant.

[Note: Lemen's much-revised essay, "Earning a Halo Can Stink to High Heaven," was published by Smithsonian magazine]