How much rewriting or revision do you do?

Originally asked

The Paris Review, to novelists and poets, The Art of Fiction

A recurring Art of Fiction craft question, sometimes asked about daily rewriting and sometimes about the number of drafts.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Lauren Groff said elsewhere, not written here
No, I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.

Scarlett Harris, The Creative Independent interview, 27 November 2024 source ↗

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