Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [74]
I could go on. But this chapter, like Abraham Lincoln’s legs, is plenty long enough as it is.
And that’s the long and short of it.
Chapter 13
Rewriting
I rewrite constantly. For every page that gets printed there must be five that go into the wastebasket. One of the hardest aspects of writing is accepting this squandering of labor, but it is essential. I doubt if there is one page in a thousand, throughout the whole of literature, that wouldn’t have been improved by the author’s redoing it.
—Russell H. Greenan
Professional writers vary considerably in their approach to rewriting. Some would endorse the observation quoted above while others would dismiss it as nonsense. Some regard rewriting as the genuinely enjoyable side of their occupation, the stage in which one sees the book taking its final form. Others hate rewriting but do it anyway. Some do one complete draft after another until the book satisfies them. Others polish each page before moving on to the next one. Some write five or more drafts of a book before they feel they’ve got it right. Others submit their first drafts.
I don’t believe there’s any right or wrong way to approach rewriting, not with so many pros having so much success with so many widely divergent methods. As with so many aspects of writing, each writer must determine what works best in his own particular case—what method produces the best work and makes him most comfortable.
I myself have always been the sort of writer who loathes revision. Looking back over the years, I can see a couple of factors which tend to explain this attitude. I was always more concerned with the accomplishment than the act; I was interested less in writing, you might say, than in having written. Once I finished writing a short story or a novel I wanted to consider myself done with it for all time. Indeed, the minute I typed “The End” I wanted to be able to take a deep breath, walk around the corner, and see my work in print at the newsstand. The last thing I desired at such a moment was to sit down, take an even deeper breath, and commence feeding the whole thing through the typewriter a second time.
Because I was a naturally smooth stylist, as I mentioned a couple of chapters back, I could get away with submitting first drafts. They didn’t look rough. And, because I had a sort of fictive tunnel vision, I was unlikely to see more than one way that a book could be written.
When I was writing the soft-core sex novels, economic considerations largely ruled out rewriting. Who could afford it? Who had time for it? When you’re turning out somewhere between twelve and twenty books a year, you may cheerfully agree with Greenan’s point and still never rewrite a line. So what if every last one of your pages could be improved by making another trip through your typewriter? There’s no time to polish each page to perfection, and no incentive, either. The readers won’t notice the difference. The publisher probably won’t notice either, and wouldn’t care if he did.
There’s even an argument against revision, and it may have applied to those early sex novels. Jack Kerouac advanced it when he spoke of his writing as “spontaneous bop prosody,” equating his manner of composition to a jazz musician’s creative improvisation. More cynically, the lead character in Barry N. Malzberg’s Herovit’s World, a hack science-fiction writer enormously contemptuous of his own work, argues that rewriting would rob his crap of the only thing it has going for it, its freshness. Once you start rewriting, Herovit holds, you’re not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. All you wind up doing is what William Goldman, discussing