I’ve heard the saying that “Writing is rewriting.”
I’ve been working on my latest book well over a year, maybe more than eighteen months. I didn’t mark my calendar when I started. I wonder what that amount of time without a finished manuscript sounds like to my friends. I finished my first draft in January and a couple friends read some of it, but it wasn’t long before my own reflections led me to edit so much that as to make that manuscript obsolete.
Many people remind me not to let perfect be the enemy of the good and related phrases, but they’re saying it without knowing the relative qualities of the drafts. They aren’t even comparable. If I had simply copy edited the January draft so that the sentences and paragraphs flowed, but didn’t work on the composition and content, that book would not have communicated my most important messages.
I mostly knew those messages, but only by writing and rewriting could I have distilled them to identify them enough to communicate them in plain language. Before then, I would have to talk for an hour to communicate some of my core ideas, but I’d jump around and loop back. Even after over six months, when I think I know the core ideas and general composition, I’m still struggling to simplify and clarify the message.
One of my main challenges: to communicate to people that they have been induced to violate their values—that is, they have been corrupted—in ways they know but bury to avoid conscious awareness that they are contributing to their biggest problems so they want to keep turning the page, to see how to change their lives by uncorrupting themselves.
Another challenge: to enable the reader to see that we will achieve a solution that seems impossible but is simple, though not easy or fast, but is at each step rewarding.
Anyway, I just wanted to post that for me these days writing my book is refining, clarifying, simplifying, and composing. In practice, it looks like writing a lot by hand, crossing many things out, trying to transfer it to the computer, but struggling between the media.
It’s also reading and listening to a lot of books and conversations with authors.
Also referring to the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence a lot.
Some relevant quotes from writers:
- Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. John Updike
- I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers. Vladimir Nabokov
- Rewriting is the essence of writing well. William Zinsser
- Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. Colette
- Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts. Larry King
- Books aren’t written. They’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it. Michael Crichton
- More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina. John Irving
