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.
Ariel Courage, The Creative Independent interview source ↗
I print every draft out even if it’s like seven things I want to change and then I type it all back into the computer sentence by sentence so that every single one is good and I’ll mumble them to myself as I’m doing that to make sure they sound okay.
First of all, you can correct mistakes much more easily. One sweep of the palette-knife 'lifts' the blood and tears of a morning from the canvas and enables a fresh start to be made; indeed the canvas is all the better for past impressions.
I workshopped that first full draft with them and got some feedback and then I set it aside for three months and deliberately didn’t look at it or think about it at all and then came back to it a month ago. I think it’s really crucial for me to get some distance from my writing so that I can then come back to it with fresh eyes and read it as if someone else wrote it and be able to see, from there, the work that’s needed.
Because I have to read everything I write and edit it. So I’m not a natural writer. She’s more a natural writer than I am. But I can do what I need to do to give myself enough time to write papers, edit them, before I turn them in. And that’s what I still do.
Khaled Hosseini, Melissa Febos, Ben Marcus, Jessica Hopper, Lauren Groff, Rax King
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