TUTELARY WHISPERS: or HOW TO APPROACH REWRITES
I was asked to describe my approach to rewriting.
Before anything let me point out this badass note by Lauren Razavi that lays out their approach.
Helpful is putting it mildly. I will not be anywhere near as badass or concise but since I was asked in good faith, I will attempt to answer the rewrite question in the same spirit:
At the start of my writing journey I thought about first drafts in the standard way — I assumed first drafts were shit (Hemingway), a catastrophe (de Botton), messy flailing around (Egan), a lump of narrative that if the fiction orishas were on my side I would be able to beat or whittle into serviceable shape through craft and application.
As you might I imagine, given that negativity, my relationship to rewriting was less than awesome. Like Baldwin, I found rewriting “very painful.”
But not long after I started my MFA at Cornell, in the midst of all that cold and uncertainty, I realized something crucial about my first drafts that has guided my rewriting process ever since.