There’s No Such Thing as Good Writing: Craig Nova’s Radical Revising Process

ARTICLE BY JOE FASSLER VIA THE ATLANTIC

Craig Nova, author ofAll the Dead Yale Men, is a manic rewriter. He showed me a picture of what he calls his “slag heap”—a huge stack of manuscript pages, piled several feet high, that accumulated as he wrote his latest book. Nova does not merely tinker with word choice the way some editors do; instead, he writes again from scratch. Sometimes he’ll approach a first draft in radical new ways, adopting new points of view—even trying again in different genr...