[Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship.
As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.
I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.
Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.
We shall make reservation after reservation, amend and amend, until there is nothing left.
It worked exactly as he planned.
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Writing for me is largely about rewriting.
With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.
Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.
Seeing the first edit is the worst.
Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.
Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I've rewritten it.
We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
I'm a big advocate of revisions, of living with something for a month and then realizing what needs changing, what was lazy, what could be better.
I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.
