Topical Guide 213
Mark Dorset
Writing: Rough Drafts, Characteristics of: contradictions, repetitions, vague ideas, and false starts
I had papers everywhere—in neat piles on the floor, on my dresser, on my desk, on the window sills, on the lamps, on my bed, on my bedside table, tacked to the walls. I had found that there was a lot more to it than typing. The box of notes contained so many contradictions, repetitions, vague ideas, and false starts that I still seemed a long way from typing despite all the work I’d done.
Little Follies, “The Young Tars”
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.William Safire (from The New York Times)
Half an hour passed. Despite all my efforts, I was quite unable to get to sleep: an endless succession of vague, unnecessary thoughts dragged one after another persistently and monotonously through my mind just like the buckets of a water-lifting machine.
Ivan S. Turgenev, “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District”
Think, for instance, of a writer who is trying to convey certain ideas which to him are contained in mental images. He isn’t quite sure how those images fit together in his mind, and he experiments around, expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some version. But does he know where it all came from? Only in a vague sense. Much of the source, like an iceberg, is deep underwater, unseen—and he knows that.
I lay in that wide and lumpy bed at Mme. Chapin’s until I was woken by the siren at the fire station nearby. Then the life-long panic of the writer’s life began. A whole day free, yet eaten by the anxiety of having to write something: the day of false starts, torn-up paper—how I grew to love tearing up paper.
See also: Revision: rewriting, revising, rethinking, renovating TG 10
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