All of the great writers of the world have been rewriters. Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, they’re all rewriters, everybody who writes for a living is a rewriter. Maybe Shelley’s Ozymandias was written once, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.
And I know the story about Frost writing Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening and his pen almost never left the page, well that’s wonderful but that’s a counterpoint to the way writing really happens. It just doesn’t happen that way, every poem I write I write twenty to thirty times.
You tell me you want to be a writer, I say to a third grader, I stand first in line to applaud you, the next words out of your mouth should be but I promise I will be a rewriter.