Writers on Rewriting

My favorite chapter in John Trimble's superb Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (Prentice Hall, 2000) also happens to be the shortest. In a book otherwise packed with practical advice and apt examples, the chapter on revising is strikingly spare--just a few lines from a 1958 Paris Review interview:

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.

"Getting the words right" may not be a satisfactory explanation of the messy, sometimes frustrating process that we call revising, but we're unlikely to find a more succinct description of it.

"When I say writing," observed novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, "O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind." And according to E. B. White, "The best writing is rewriting." Indeed, says Joyce Carol Oates, "The pleasure is the rewriting."

Too often in schools the injunction to "write it over again" is delivered (or at least perceived) as a punishment or dull chore. But, as the professionals remind us, the effort to get the words right is an essential part of composing--and often in the end the most rewarding part. "I can’t understand how anyone can write," Leo Tolstoy said, "without rewriting everything over and over again."

To hear more from the pros about the craft of writing, please visit these pages:

• Advice from One Writer to Another (part one)
• Advice from One Writer to Another (part two)
• Writers on Writing
• What Is Style?

Finally, keep in mind Mark Twain's observation: "The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning-bug & the lightning." It's worth the effort to get the words right.

Image: Ernest Hemingway, copyright © The Nobel Foundation