Ring the bells that still can ringThen I continued reading the post and found this:
Forget your perfect offering.There is a crack in everything --That's how the light gets in.- Leonard Cohen
Anyway, I wrote many, many pages, about half of which I crossed out, but that's okay, that's what this book seems to be like -- I write the wrong thing about 5 times, and that brings me around to the right thing. I hope?That's what my revisions have felt like for me lately. A whole lot of cut, rewrite, cut, rewrite. I wrote the first chapter FIVE times. Five. Five. Carefully laid out chapters are getting slashed and rearranged and cut and repasted and cut again and...
...argh.
3 comments:
Ha! Your post rings true for me too. Write, re-write, revise, re-revise. But it is such a thrill (and feels almost new) to get it right, even if it takes five tries!
But it's so great knowing each time you cut and revise, you're improving!
It's so true, PJ, that my writing does get better each time--and I think how willing I am to revise also shows growth in my own writing (I don't know about you, but I used to never cut stuff).
And Angela, you're right, too--when you finally get it right, it's soooo worth it. I remember recently a reviewer on an online site said that she wasn't sure if my opening was the right place to start the novel. At the time, I didn't understand at all what she meant--the first line was right there--how could that NOT be the right place to start the novel? But now that I've actually got the right beginning, I finally know it's right.
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