S.

“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative