What Playing a Munchkin Onstage Taught Me About Revision

May 7, 2026

by Nancy McCabe, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty

A few months ago, when I heard that a local production of The Wizard of Oz needed tap dancers, I decided to try out, since I’d enjoyed tap dancing and clogging in local demos and shows. But with one exception, I’d never participated in a play in my adult life before I was cast as an Ozian as well as the oldest jitterbug and the tallest munchkin.

Around the same time, I was working with a Spalding student who wrote beautiful drafts but was dismayed when I made suggestions for bringing her work to the next level. I also gave feedback to a friend who sent me some vivid, funny, insightful, but still rough material that she was working on adding to an essay collection. She said about my suggestions, “That sounds like a lot of work!”

Both writers had excellent material—interesting situations, distinctive voices, and memorable passages. I was surprised that they balked, at least initially, at the idea of pushing their work further. I thought they were both on the brink of the really fun part of the process—reshaping, rearranging, playing, exploring, discovering, sharpening their work, developing scenes, enlarging image patterns, heightening important moments, bringing into focus their powerful stories.

Neither of these writers were buying my enthusiasm about the revision process or a quote from Sue Shapiro’s Book Bible: “Real writing is rewriting, part of the process successful writers look forward to with delight. The music of the language always comes late in the process. Give the orchestra plenty of time to warm up.” Both of these writers were already warmed up, the music of the language emerging, so the next step I envisioned was more like musicians playing pieces repeatedly to build muscle memory and refine technique, dynamics, and phrasing.

But back to The Wizard of Oz. What I ended up finding most rewarding was watching the show evolve, underscoring for me the way art is achieved in layers. We didn’t start by putting on costumes and hopping on a stage complete with sets to try to sing, dance, and recite lines. That would have been a muddle. Instead, the production unfolded in steps. First, a read-through in the dimly lit playhouse with bursts of light poking down from the ceiling, sort of the rough draft. Next, three weeks of music. The jitterbug song was especially rough, with passages of scatting that I found bewildering (“I hate this song,” the music director kept saying). Sitting, standing, dancing, then moving around on stage through the munchkin sequence and the “Merry Old Land of Oz.”

Then, three weeks of choreography, which included a few hours a week of learning the jitterbug dance in the playhouse basement next to racks of green Ozian costumes while Glinda passed through in her sundress and returned in a floaty pink dress and upstairs the poppies banged and crashed. The tap dancing kicked my butt; I’d wrecked my bike and injured my back and hip right before rehearsals started, and even under the best of circumstances I wouldn’t have been as spry and energetic as the other jitterbugs, all in their teens and twenties.

I listened to the soundtrack in my car to get down the songs and constantly reviewed dance steps in my head, freaking out the dogs by practicing in the kitchen, bemusing the husband of a friend I stayed with a couple of days when he came home to find a stranger tap dancing in his foyer. I was in the rough draft stage for a really long time. For many cast members, all of this came more naturally. Despite that, everyone was patient with the slow process of building a show—way more patient than we sometimes are with building a piece of writing.

During the last few weeks, we blocked scenes and found costumes and had them approved while, behind the scenes, others were working on sets. Then we stitched dialogue, songs, and dances all together. Even then things were pretty messy, especially the jitterbug scene. There were repeated run-throughs of Acts One and Two on alternating nights, and then finally, the move to the local high school auditorium, the addition of the orchestra, and several entire rehearsals. The jitterbug scene, with its fast dance that required precise timing, went from total disaster to mildly chaotic and back to total disaster before it finally began to cohere. By the last performance, a lot of cast members reported that the jitterbug song was their favorite. Some of the teenaged Winkies were caught on video performing the dance steps backstage in synch with our performance.   

In contrast to the long process of putting on a musical, there’s a prevalent notion that for good writers, work should appear fully formed on the page. Many of us have an impulse to speed through the process instead of embracing the idea that writing happens in stages—and that if we don’t rush those stages, gradually mastering each can be satisfying and fulfilling. First drafts inevitably fall short of our original vision. With patience we can bring them closer to those intentions—or better yet, push those intentions further as we deepen characters and gain new perspective.

In her book Writing as a Way of Healing, Louise DeSalvo offers specific steps for the writing process, reminding us that if we put too much pressure on one stage—like trying to sing and dance before we’ve mastered both the music and the choreography—we’ll be discouraged and potentially derailed. She defines the stages of writing as preparation and germination (making notes, writing fragments), working (writing a rough draft, following impulses and instincts), deepening and shaping (revising to find form, developing images, metaphors, symbols, being alert to new connections), and completion (polishing).

The two writers I’d been working with in the fall wanted to be in the completion stage whereas it seemed to me they were still in the deepening and shaping stage. I’ve encountered that pitfall many times in my own work. But it’s important to remember that these stages aren’t necessarily linear; sometimes we move back and forth between them, and sometimes they overlap.

A few months after The Wizard of Oz, I became a psychiatrist stuck in an elevator in the same theater’s production of Going Up? The main challenge for me was learning sixty-seven lines. The overall process was much simpler than putting together a musical, but once again, it happened in steps. Eventually we ran through the entire play every night for seven nights, in costume, before the show. Such repetition could be a little tedious, but it also helped smooth out rough spots, lock in lines, and deepen understanding of characters. For me, even the performances felt like subsequent drafts. It wasn’t until the last one that I felt that I fully relaxed into my role without my mind constantly racing to summon up my next line.

I might do more shows in the future. I gained confidence and new skills from these two experiences as well as insight from a new angle on constructing scenes and writing dialogue. But most of all, what I took away was more perspective and patience in taking my time and letting the layers of stories and essays unfold, and encouraging those I mentor to do the same.

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Nancy McCabe is the author of ten books, most recently the middle-grade novel Fires Burning Underground (Regal House, 2025), the comic novel The Pamela Papers (Outpost 19, 2024), the young adult novel Vaulting through Time (CamCat, 2024), and the memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved? (U of Missouri Press, 2020). She’s currently working on the craft book Creating Some Measure of Beauty: The Healing Power of the Artful Essay, under contract with the University of New Mexico Press.