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.
In order to end up with anything you can use, you have to excavate a whole bunch of stuff you can’t use, and get it all out of your system, and then go back later and chip away at all the terrible stuff that you’ve uncovered, and find the things that go together, ideas that go together, and motifs that feel like they keep coming up; and then, reassemble a piece of writing that way. That’s also what I do for my own stuff.
Shy Watson, The Creative Independent interview, 21 December 2021 source ↗