Topical Guide 794
Mark Dorset
Writing: drafting, rewriting, revising, rethinking
Allusion
At Home with the Glynns, Preface:
Permit me a brief aside on the subject of composition, recollection, introspection, and the effect of each on the others. […]
Here, now, as I write these words, upstairs in Small’s Hotel, in the quiet predawn hours of November 22, 1991 (a damp morning, after a nighttime snowfall, the white margin of my island and its dark fringe of grasses standing out crisp and sharp against the gray sky and gray bay, and Babbington, across the bay, an abstraction, a stack of black and white rectangles), and again on January 16, March 11, March 25, April 15, and November 18, 1992, and on September 30 and October 1, 1993, and on May 13, December 6, and December 12, 1994, when I return to these words to read them and revise them, I recall retracing my steps and seeing, from the corner of my mind’s eye, that formerly unnoticed turning, the alleyway not taken.
Andre Gide, Les Caves du Vatican (Lafacdio’s Adventures)
Julius drew himself up.
“I don’t write for the sake of amusement,” he answered nobly. “The joy that I feel in writing is superior to any that I might find in living. Moreover, the one is not incompatible with the other.”
“So they say,” replied Lafcadio. Then abruptly raising his voice, which he had dropped as though inadvertently: “Do you know what it is I dislike about writing?—All the scratchings out and touchings up that are necessary.”
“Do you think there are no corrections in life too?” asked Julius, beginning to prick up his ears.
“You misunderstand me. In life one corrects oneself—one improves oneself—so people say; but one can’t correct what one does. It’s the power of revising that makes writing such a colorless affair—such a . . .” (He left his sentence unfinished.) “Yes! That’s what seems to me so fine about life. It’s like frescoe-painting—erasures aren’t allowed.”
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
See also:
Writing: Drafting TG 421; Revision: rewriting, revising, rethinking, renovating TG 10, TG 421; Writing (and Drawing): Drafting, Writing (and Drawing): Revising TG 421
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