“The story, in the first draft, has put on rough but adequate clothes, it is ‘finished’ and might be thought to need no more than a lot of technical adjustments… It’s then, in fact, that the story is in the greatest danger of losing its life, of appearing so hopelessly misbegotten that my only relief comes from abandoning it. It doesn’t do enough. It does what I intended, but it turns out that my intention was all wrong….I go around glum and preoccupied, trying to think of ways to fix the problem. Usually the right way pops up in the middle of this.
A big relief. Renewed energy. Resurrection.
Except that it isn’t the right way. Maybe a way to the right way. Now I write pages and pages I’ll have to discard. New angles are introduced, minor characters brought center stage, lively and satisfying scenes are written, and it’s all a mistake. Out they go. But by this time I’m on the track, there’s no backing out. I know so much more than I did, I know what I want to happen and where I want to end up and I just have to keep trying till I find the best way of getting there.”
— Alice Munro
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“When you clean a fish, the first thing that goes is the head. Generally manuscripts should receive the same treatment because they, too, often have indigestible heads. This is especially true of fiction. The first thirty pages (beginning ‘I was born on a cold winter’s day in a small town in Louisiana…’) may be background—a warming-up that’s necessary for the writer—but uninteresting and not useful to the reader.”
— Kenneth Atchity
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INTERVIEWER: Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in proofs. You’re grateful for their different chances.
INTERVIEWER: How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY: It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
— The Paris Review Interview