On rewriting…

I’m tidying up my computer, deleting years worth of stuff from various old computers that I migrated. Qu’elle boring!

But I did find this quote that I’d felt the need to copy and paste, which was just as well because I can’t find it on the interpipe anymore. I get asked for a lot of writing tips and I’m all about the planning, the outlining, the writing, then the rewriting and more rewriting. Best advice I ever got was “don’t get it right, get it written.” Second best piece of advice I ever got was “everything is cut-able.” Honestly, it really is.

Anyway, this is an Anthony Lane (critic for The New Yorker and memoirist) quote from his November 2 diary in *Slate* back in 2002, when you could do the whole internet in one afternoon and sums up why rewriting and cutting and rewriting is so pleasurable.

And so to Tuesday. Tuesday is a treat because Tuesday gives me leave not to write, which signals pain, but to rewrite, which augurs joy.

Between the squalls of composition and the bathetic pangs of publication comes an interval of peace in which I return to the work, print it out in proofs, immediately spy 17 correctable errors for every 1,000 words, lop off whole paragraphs like a tree surgeon hacking at a larch, and tenderly position the remainder so as to give the impression, or the illusion, of coherence.

The thrill of this activity is not, strictly speaking, a literary matter; it is, in its small way, more of a spiritual hint, reminding us that, more often than not, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, that we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and that there is no health in us.

Rewriting is one of the few pursuits in life which enable us to make good our mistakes, or to make better our cheesy efforts, and to get immediate results; what is more, all of this can be achieved without having to buy flowers, lingerie, or chocolate truffles.

I would also heartily recommend Nobody’s Perfect: Writings from the New Yorker by Anthony Lane