Discover First, Decide Later

Drafting and revising ask different questions. Drafting asks what else is here, and rewards range: the odd detail, the alternative ending, the paragraph that may belong to a different book. Revision asks which of these the Work needs, and rewards a willingness to refuse good material. A choice among versions that exist is made on evidence, because you can see what each one does, while a line judged the moment it is written has nothing to be measured against. If the second question arrives during the first, the possibilities die before they can be compared. If the first never gives way to the second, you end with a pile.

Hemingway told The Paris Review in 1958 that he rewrote each day up to the point where he had stopped, went over the whole when it was finished, and was grateful for the further chances that a typist’s clean copy and the proofs provided. Revision sat inside his drafting, and rereading yesterday’s pages was how he got back into the work. What needs separating, then, is attention, whatever the calendar. Rereading to regain momentum counts as generating. The judging starts with rereading to condemn, and the first shouldn’t slide into the second without your noticing.

Nor is every decision barred from the draft. A writer may decide on page eighty to change the narrator, provided it is recognized as a decision and made on purpose, instead of the editorial voice leaking into composition. Planners discover too; Practice 23 shows where.

Practice. Take one passage that will not settle, the end of a scene or the opening of a section. In a first session of twenty-five minutes, write three versions that differ in a real way, with a different point of entry, a different order, or a different emphasis, and record no preferences. The next day, in a second session of the same length, read all three and write one sentence on what each does for the reader that the others do not. Choose one, and write one sentence saying why. Put the other two in a cuts file, a separate document where removed passages are kept (Practice 84), and begin revising only the survivor. If you can’t write a different sentence for each version, the three were one version in different clothes, and the draft still needs a real alternative.